Dab: Color Picker, Eyedropper

About this app

One click and the hex is on your clipboard. Dab is a menu bar color picker for macOS, a small dot that wears the color of your last pick. It never asks for Screen Recording permission, because it samples with the built-in macOS color sampler instead of capturing your screen. Picking and copying are free forever. ONE CLICK, ANY PIXEL ON SCREEN Click the dot or press your global shortcut, and the eyedropper follows your cursor. Sample from any app, window, or image on screen. The Picker HUD shows a hero swatch, a generated color name, a contrast badge, and a chip for every format. 21 COLOR FORMATS, ONE TAP EACH HEX, HEX with alpha, RGB, RGBA, CSS rgb, HSL, HSLA, HSB, CMYK, OKLCH, OKLAB, CIELAB, Display P3, named color, Tailwind class, SwiftUI Color, NSColor, UIColor, Android argb, Flutter Color, and Unity Color. Tap a chip and it is on the clipboard. No hand-converting hex to rgb, no hunting for the closest utility class by eye. COLOR NAMES THAT FIT Every pick gets an evocative two-word name like Cobalt Blue or Wasabi Green, worked out from the color itself rather than looked up in a table. PALETTE STUDIO, NEW IN 1.2 Press Command G for a full palette generator in its own window. Full-bleed color columns, the space bar to generate, and a lock on any column you like. Choose a harmony method and a mood, open the tints and shades matrix, browse alternatives, nudge HSL on one color or palette-wide with Adjust All, drag to reorder, undo and redo. Save, export, or export a gradient. Visualize paints the palette onto a sample interface. Palette Studio also provides a WCAG and APCA contrast matrix and a color vision preview, so you know it reads well before you ship. EXPLORE PALETTES, NEW IN 1.2 Command E opens 317 curated palettes, bundled in the app and fully offline. Search by name, by tag, or by pasting a hex code to surface related palettes. Filter with multi-select tags, sort four ways, star favorites, and browse 10 collections plus a Recommended shelf. ON-DEVICE ASSISTANT, NEW IN 1.2 Ask for a warm retro palette in plain language. With macOS 26 or later, supported hardware, and Apple Intelligence switched on, it runs on your Mac to turn it into tags and a mood, then Dab draws real palettes from its own library. It never invents colors, works offline, and falls back to keywords whenever Apple Intelligence is unavailable. CONTRAST AND COLOR VISION Check any color with the WCAG contrast ratio and the newer APCA Lc metric. Preview through protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia simulation, with conflict badges. HISTORY, RELATIONSHIPS, SHORTCUTS Every pick saves itself, grouped by day and searchable by hex or name. See complementary, analogous, triadic, and split complementary colors for anything you pick. Global shortcuts pick a color, open history, reopen the last pick, or copy the last color without the mouse. In the live playground, type a hex code and watch every format, the name, contrast, and relationships resolve as you type. TWELVE LANGUAGES English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, and Russian, with a language picker in Settings. PRIVATE BY ARCHITECTURE Data Not Collected. No account, no analytics, no tracking, no crash reporting. Dab ships with no network entitlement at all, so it cannot phone home. iCloud history sync, if you turn it on, uses your own iCloud storage, never a Dab server. The app is sandboxed. FREE CORE, OPTIONAL PRO Picking and copying all 21 formats is free and unlimited, forever. Pro is optional at US$5.99 a month, or US$39.99 once for lifetime with no subscription. It adds Save as Card exports (poster, token, spec) to PNG or SVG, image-palette extraction in Explore and Palette Studio, iCloud history sync, and Smart Copy, which notices the app in front of you and copies the format it expects. Requires macOS 14.0 or later. Terms: https://dab.onl/terms Privacy: https://dab.onl/privacy

Version 1.2.1 is a stability and polish release. FIXED: A FREEZE WHEN PICKING QUICKLY Picking several colors one after another could leave the pointer unresponsive. Dab now leaves a moment between picks, starts each one fresh, and ignores menu bar clicks and window shortcuts while the eyedropper is on screen, so a new pick can never begin while the previous one is still shutting down. FIXED: HISTORY NOW SURVIVES A RESTART Your picked colors were cleared every time Dab restarted. Dab saved them in one format and read them back in another, so the file it had just written looked unreadable on the next launch. That is fixed. Dab also restores the colors earlier versions set aside, so anything it could not read before comes back the first time you open this version. WINDOWS OPEN WHERE YOU ARE WORKING Palette Studio, Explore Palettes, History, and every sheet now open centered on the display your pointer is on, instead of drifting to another screen or sitting too high. A REAL MENU FOR THE APP Command W now closes the front window, the way it does everywhere else on the Mac. A new Color menu holds Pick Color, Copy Last Color, History, Palette Studio, and Explore Palettes, with the same shortcuts as the menu bar dropdown. An empty View menu and a sidebar shortcut that did nothing have been removed. A SLIMMER HOME BASE The Dock hub is tighter. The last picked color card is about half its previous height and the recent strip is gone, so the actions you came for sit right at the top. ALSO IN THIS RELEASE Saving a color card now confirms when it worked and says so when it did not. Several labels that still showed English in translated builds are now translated, and each feature goes by one name in every language. Plus a round of smaller corrections across the picker, History, Palette Studio, and Explore Palettes. Picking and copying all 21 formats stays free and unlimited.

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1. First observed Aug 8, 2026 · 11:06 PM Free