As part of my trade, I work a lot with colors. ColorSchemer Studio has long been a valuable tool in my toolkit for picking out color schemes based on solid color theory. It had its shortcomings, though, and some other tools had surpassed it, both on the desktop and on the iPhone. However, I got a sneak peek at the up-and-coming version 2.0 of ColorSchemer Studio, and I'm willing to say that it's poised to regain its lead in the field.

ColorSchemer Studio 2 adds an amazing number of new features, and improves on just about every aspect of the existing toolkit. Firstly, I want to highlight that it can now work entirely in the CMYK gamut, if you choose. Screen colors are adjusted to a CMYK profile, and there are export options to match. That's a big deal for those who take their colors off the screen and into the real world. Even though many modern presses can actually get better color from an RGB file, CMYK still rules in the world of offset printing. While it's a huge step for this app, it's not the coolest part ... read on for an in-depth preview.

In honor of the holiday weekend, when many of us overate ourselves into food comas, I'm coining a word to describe a class of shareware apps: "lunchware," those programs inexpensive enough that you could buy them for what you might otherwise spend on lunch. If it's less than $12, it's lunchware, so Cocoamug's new Leopard dock customization tool Palette meets the standard (€6.90, or about $10.20). For less than the cost of a burger and a beer (at least by NYC prices) you can get several Leopard interface tweak tools in one little app.

For those who have followed Mat's previous posts on drawer-izing the Dock and creating your own custom drawer icons, Palette lets you quickly swap your own drawer icons in for your stacks (or downloaded icons from a pro) without any messing about. You can also turn dock transparency or 3D effects off, change your Dock or menubar colors, and turn off the dreaded menubar transparency. The unregistered version leaves a little palette micro-icon on your drawers to remind you to register.

via Cocoia -- thanks Sebastiaan

One of the things I'm sure we all love about Mac OS X is how integrated so many of the apps and services are with each other, but did you know that integration can stem all the way down to the fonts and colors you use amongst your apps? In almost any input-based, Cocoa-written app you're running (Firefox, for example, is not written in Cocoa), you can press cmd + t to open a simple, unassuming fonts palette that you've probably seen at one time or another. But if you chose a particular font and size that you like in one program, you can click on the gear in the bottom left of that panel and chose 'Add to Favorites' which places it in a category aptly named Favorites on the left side of that panel. The beauty of this is that any other program that has access to that system-wide fonts palette can also make use of the fonts you mark as favorites. For bonus points, click and drag the dot at the top of that panel to reveal a preview area (pictured) where you can see what your font is going to look like before running with it.

Next up is the Color palette, accessible with the cmd + shift + c shortcut. This palette employs the same basic concept: you can use it to find a color you like, and then drag a swatch of that color to the white squares at the bottom of the panel to save a version and share it amongst your other Cocoa-based apps.

These little built-in tools can be really handy when working across many apps in Mac OS X. You can set a favorite font in Yojimbo (or your choice of other junk drawer apps), and then use it when chatting with a friend in Adium or iChat. Use a favorite color for highlighting in OmniOutliner? Why not save it for the next Mail message you have to send, or those Final Cut Pro and Motion projects coming down the pipeline?

By no means are these a revolution feature of Mac OS X that'll rake in the switchers, but they might just make your daily activities go a little bit smoother.

Here's a helpful widget for all you web design/creative professionals who are looking for a little inspiration. ColorBurn by firewheel design is a Dashboard widget that suggests one color palette per day, consisting of four colors and their corresponding hexadecimal values. You can change the widget's background from black to white, and view the previous seven days' palettes. Here's hoping you find it inspirational (or at the least, nice to look at).

[Via What Do I Know]