Introducing ColorCopy

My second macOS app, ColorCopy, was approved by the Mac App Store today! It started as a menu bar color picker: press a key, click any pixel on your screen, and the color lands on your clipboard in whatever format you need. But then I kept finding more things I wanted to bake into it…

I build small, simple, stable software. ColorCopy fits that description, and like TongueType before it, it scratches an itch I've had for a long time.

Why I made it

I pick colors off my screen constantly. A shade in a screenshot, a brand color on a website, an accent color in an app I want to match. There are many color picker apps that already exist, so why build another one?

Picking colors is the easy part. I wanted an app that lets me:

• Pick a color from anywhere quickly (hotkey, click, done)
• Access a color picker with the press of a hotkey
• Compare contrast ratios for WCAG + APCA
• Create and edit color palettes (and access them instantly with a hotkey)
• Generate color palettes from an image
• Import and export color palettes to various formats
• Sync my settings via iCloud

Plus, I enjoy building my own tools!

How it works

Press the hotkey (or right-click the menu bar icon), click any pixel on screen, and the color is formatted and written to your clipboard. Paste it wherever you're going.

ColorCopy gives you four configurable global hotkeys for each tool: one to pick a color instantly, one to open the Color Picker window, one to access your palettes, and one more to open the contrast checker.

There's a familiar Color Picker built in with an eyedropper that shows the selected color in all 21 formats at once. Click a row to copy. It's the format converter I always wanted.

Palettes

A color picker that forgets every color the moment you copy it isn't much of a tool. ColorCopy keeps a configurable history of recent picks, and it features a full palette manager.

There are 24 built-in presets including Tailwind, Material Design 3, Radix Colors, Open Color, IBM Carbon, GitHub Primer, Apple System Colors, and more. You can build unlimited custom palettes, organize them into named scales, and drag swatches around freely.

Star any swatch and it shows up under a Favorites submenu right in the menu bar. One click and that exact color is on your clipboard. The colors you reach for most are always one gesture away.

You can also extract a palette from any image by dragging one onto the window. You choose how many colors to pull, and it saves the result as a new palette.

Palettes import from Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ase), Apple Color List (.clr), and JSON and export to eight formats, including CSS custom properties, HTML, PDF, PNG, and more.

If you turn on iCloud sync, your palettes and settings follow you to all your Macs!

A built-in contrast checker

Colors rarely live alone. Text sits on a background, an icon sits on a button, and whether that pairing is actually readable shouldn't be a guess. So ColorCopy has a contrast checker built right in.

Pick a background and a foreground color and ColorCopy reports the contrast in both WCAG 2 (with AA/AAA pass/fail for normal and large text) and APCA (the newer perceptual algorithm, with body, large-text, and UI tiers). If a pair fails, open the context menu, select fix, and ColorCopy nudges the color just enough to meet the desired contrast.

Color contrast isn't only an aesthetic decision. For people with low vision, it's the difference between readable and not. I wanted that check to live right next to where you pick colors, so there's no excuse to skip it.

A fun personality

ColorCopy is minimal and lives entirely in the menu bar. But it's not joyless. There are three menu bar icon styles, adjustable swatch sizes, and nine copy sounds to pick from (or silence, if you prefer). None of it changes what ColorCopy does, but you'll reach for it dozens of times a day, so the tool should feel good to use.

Privacy

ColorCopy runs on your Mac. There's no account, no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporter, and no server for your data to land on. Two things are opt-in: in-app purchase, which goes through Apple's StoreKit, and iCloud sync, which keeps your palettes and settings consistent across your Macs through your own private iCloud account. (iCloud sync is off by default, and even when it's on, your data goes to Apple's iCloud, never to me.)

It also needs no special permissions. ColorCopy uses Apple's sandboxed NSColorSampler so it never asks for Screen Recording or Accessibility access. It's a fully sandboxed build.

Pricing

ColorCopy is free to download, and the free tier includes every feature: all 21 formats, the Color Picker window, the contrast checker, the palette manager, image-to-palette extraction, favorites, recent colors, and every customization setting. The free tier is metered to 50 color copies per month.

If you want unlimited copies, ColorCopy Pro is a one-time $7.99 purchase that removes the monthly cap. That's the only difference between the tiers. No subscription. Buy it once, keep it forever.

Requirements

ColorCopy needs macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. It's available now on the Mac App Store in 10 languages.

If you copy colors off your screen even occasionally, give it a try at ColorCopy.app. It's free to start, and I'd genuinely love to hear what you think!