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Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS

desktopcolors.com

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Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS

#71
post #70

Nice one, travelled back in time a bit. One thing that was unexpected for me is when you hover on the circles in the Known Uses section of a color, I expeceted that the given OS will be shown as a tooltip (maybe also clickable) and I don't need to click on the "View all X palettes" link. But lovely idea, thanks for sharing.

Ah, I can see! The dots mark years (not OSs) since multiple OSs might use the same color in the same release year. However, you're totally right: the tooltip is dearly missing since it would make just that obvious - and also a default action when clicking a dot.

Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS

#72

The one thing I would add to each swatch is where the number came from. A value read out of a palette table and a value sampled from a screenshot are not the same number, and the difference is invisible. I ran into this today on something unrelated. A page painted #0b0d14, and macOS screencapture wrote rgb(8,13,16) into the file, because the capture lands in the display's colour space rather than sRGB. Handing that s…

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Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded. The "personality" it tries to add is trite and tiresome and everybody immediately sees it for what it is, especially for a case like this where there's only so many ways to say "this is the default desktop color of an operating system." Not only that, but it's confusing - is "Windows Classic blue" a real thing, or just an attempt at a cute phrase? Just label the colors and be done with it.

It's actually not so easy to pick a speaking name for each color, since many colors are used in different OSs. I tried to use neutral and standard color names were they exist. Things like Windows Classic blue are probably always description-slop, though. Another user suggested to use media quotes etc. on OSs, which I think is actually a pretty good idea. I might swap the LLM generated placeholders for something like…

Understandable, and "Windows Classic blue" might not be useless if it had a function - let the user filter down to the OSes that shared a given color, so that the reason for it being named such is more clear.

Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS

#74
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a load bearing phrase here?

It's a joke, Claude AI calls everything load bearing. Once you see it it cannot be unseen.

Nice. Will keep a lookout!

Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually not so easy to pick a speaking name for each color, since many colors are used in different OSs. I tried to use neutral and standard color names were they exist. Things like Windows Classic blue are probably always description-slop, though. Another user suggested to use media quotes etc. on OSs, which I think is actually a pretty good idea. I might swap the LLM generated placeholders for something like…

Understandable, and "Windows Classic blue" might not be useless if it had a function - let the user filter down to the OSes that shared a given color, so that the reason for it being named such is more clear.

You can see all OSs using the same color on the details page. It's the "known uses" box below the preview. Click on "View all x palettes" to see the full list.

Is that what you meant?

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