Alderis is a fresh new color picker, with a gentle, fun, and dead simple user interface. It aims to incorporate the usual elements of a color picker, in a way that users will find easy and fun to use.

The user can start by selecting a color they like on the initial color palette tab, and either accept it, or refine it using the color wheel and adjustment sliders found on the two other tabs.

Alderis is named for the Alderamin (Alpha) star in the Cepheus (Cephei) constellation. (There is no dependency on the Cephei project.)

Documentation

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Why do I want this? Isn’t there already a color picker in iOS?

Alderis was originally released before iOS 14 was unveiled with a built-in color picker feature, which seems to be heavily inspired by Alderis. However, rather than throw in the towel here, I’m considering this an opportunity to continue building what I feel is a better, less cluttered user experience, with more configuration options for apps to fine-tune a color picker UI suitable for each use case and target market.

If this doesn’t seem important to you, the answer is simple: skip Alderis and use UIColorPickerViewController. If it does, read on.

Feature Comparison

* UIColorWell supports dragging colors onto it, but not out of it. Alderis supports both directions, which are separately configurable. The default Alderis ColorWell behavior matches UIColorWell. Alderis supports drag and drop on the color picker window; UIKit does not.

Installation

CocoaPods

Add to your Podfile:

pod 'Alderis', '~> 1.2.0'

And then run pod install.

Carthage

Add to your Cartfile:

github 'hbang/Alderis' ~> 1.2.0

And then run carthage update.

Swift Package Manager

1. Click File → Swift Packages → Add Package Dependency.
2. Enter http://github.com/hbang/Alderis.git.
3. Specify 1.2 as the version filter.

Or, manually add it to your Package.swift:

dependencies: [
	.package(url: "http://github.com/hbang/Alderis.git", from: "1.2.0")
]

And then run swift package update.

Jailbreak packages

Add ws.hbang.alderis (>= 1.2) to your Depends: list.

Preference Bundles and libcolorpicker Compatibility

Alderis acts as a drop-in replacement for libcolorpicker, an abandoned but still very popular color picker library on jailbroken iOS. Packages can simply change their dependencies list to replace org.thebigboss.libcolorpicker with ws.hbang.alderis (>= 1.2) to switch their color picker to Alderis. No other changes required!

For more information, refer to the docs.

License

Licensed under the Apache License, version 2.0. Refer to LICENSE.md.

Header backdrop photo credit: John-Mark Smith on Unsplash