PicPick, one of the best utilities for web developers

Episode rescued from the SeViR Notes archive and translated from Spanish. Originally published on March 27, 2015.

I’ve rarely come across such a versatile tool. Years ago I relied on a couple of utilities I simply couldn’t do without: an on-screen ruler to measure the pixels of anything I could see, and a color picker to grab any colour on the screen (which comes in handy when you’re a bit colour-blind).

On the Mac, the best option is without a doubt Color Schemer Studio, a great tool for picking colours and exploring variations on them until you end up with a matching palette.

On Windows, Color Schemer Studio isn’t quite the same as the Mac version, nor is it as easy to use. And I never found an on-screen ruler that won me over.

Then last week I finally discovered PicPick, which is also free for personal use. It doesn’t just have a Color Picker and an on-screen ruler: it also comes with a protractor, a crosshair to measure points, a screen capture tool with an editor for annotating screenshots with all sorts of elements, and finally a virtual whiteboard for drawing directly on the screen.

Highly recommended, no question about it.