Improved Color Picker
Version 8.0 makes it easier to select colors, or define custom colors, for calendar items such as events, tasks, notes, categories, priorities, and locations. To learn how these colors can be used to help you visualize your schedule, see the FAQ. Clicking the color picker will show a drop-down grid of common colors, along with buttons for setting the color to be transparent or to pick from more colors. Additional colors can be quickly selected via a color wheel, with sliders for adjusting the saturation and brightness of the color.
The appearance settings have been updated to use the new color picker, giving a cleaner look to the interface. The "Random" button has also been re-labeled "Splash", to make it more fun and clarify its intent - which is to splash the appearance with a random color combination (click it several times to find a combination you like). These new appearance settings are consistently used throughout the program, wherever color or appearance properties can be specified.
Using the New Color Picker - An Example Walkthrough
To select a different color, click the color's box. A drop-down grid of common colors will be shown.
If you don't want a background color, you can select "Transparent" for both the primary and secondary background colors. This will result in only the associated item's text being shown in the calendar, with no block around the text. To select from 16.7 million possible colors, click the "More Colors..." button at the bottom of the drop-down. This will result in the following window appearing:
To select a different color, simply click anywhere in the color wheel. The slider to the right of the color wheel allows the brightness of the color to be adjusted, and a preview of the currently selected color is shown below the OK and Cancel buttons. The sliders at the bottom of the window also be used to adjust the color. If you know the extact red, green, and blue numbers of the color you're looking for, you can enter the numbers directly into the boxes along the right side of the sliders. In the example below, the color was adjusted to a slightly-diluted red:
When finished, click the OK button. The selected color will appear in the color box. If using a gradient to blend the colors, the secondary color will probably also need to be adjusted. In the example below, the newly selected red and previous blue just don't look good together.
After clicking the "More Colors" button for the secondary color, the "Select Color" window appears. In this example, I want the secondary color to be a darker shade of the primary color. Here's where the gray box labeled "[Click here and drag to any location to capture a color from the screen]" can make life easier. Instead of trying to manually select the same hue as the primary color, simply click the gray box and drag the ink dropper to the primary color's box. After dragging, release the mouse button to capture the color. You can also drag to anywhere else on the screen to capture a color.
As indicated above, the next step in this example is to reduce the brightness by dragging the brightness bar down, as shown below.
After clicking the OK button, voila! A nicely colored gradient is shown using the custom colors selected above.
Many other gradient styles can be selected from a drop-down list. A preview of each gradient style will also be shown, using the selected colors.
Conclusion
Version 8.0 improves the selection of item colors, making it easier than ever to customize exactly how you want items to appear on the calendar. The new color-picker control rivals or exceeds the ease-of-use of color selection tools in expensive graphic editing tools, but is just one small component of the overall VueMinder experience.
