This post is a collection of documents and tools that can improve your Photoshop workflow. It’s probably not useful by itself, but is a good place to start when you want to work more efficiently.
Initially, this article was supposed to be “How to add an external flash to a Firefox OS phone” but my project did not work out. The idea was to add an external light to the camera of the Geeksphone Keon, as it doesn’t have any built in. Unfortunately, I couldn’t complete the project, here is why.
My goal was to create a tool that would help me consolidate the palette of an ever growing CSS. To achieve this goal, I needed a tool that can:
extract all colors from the CSS code. Most extractors rely on regular expression to perform this task. It may work for most cases, but they tend to fail with rgba or named values.
order colors in a sensible way. I want colors on one side and greyscale on another. I also want colors ordered by hue. Ordering hex values by alphabetical order doesn’t make sense.
roughly show how much a color is used. This way, I know that lesser used colors might be merged with dominant colors. Obviously, more occurrences in CSS doesn’t mean that the color will be more present on the website. But that’s better than nothing.
The result is CSS Color Palette Extractor, a pure JS app that does what I need. You can try the demo and fork it on github.
On the technical side, the app uses the great CSS parser written by Daniel Glazman to extract color values. It also includes code from Andrew Brehaut for color management/conversion. My own code is a bit rough but does the job. There are a few known issues. I haven’t found how to make the parser work with media queries. If you’re doing responsive design, simply extract medium per medium. Also, my app cannot extract colors from gradient backgrounds.
It’s sometimes nice to step back from code and analyze what’s going on. I hope that CSS Color Palette Extractor will help you to do just that. If you want to use the code, feel free to fork it on github.
Éric Daspet organise une soirée sur le sujet des Performances Web le 21 juillet 2010. Sponsorisée par le cabinet de conseil Octo, la soirée aura lieu dans ses locaux à partir de 19h. Stoyan Stefanov, qui fait partie de l’équipe Exceptional Performance de Yahoo! fera une présentation de plusieurs techniques avancées pour améliorer la performance des vos sites Web. La présentation sera suivie d’une séance de questions/réponses plus libre. L’inscription est gratuite, faites passer le mot!