In the making over the past few months, Aurora is a powerful new color picker and dictionary app for the iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch which features a nicely designed interface and interesting capabilities like handy code snippets aimed at programmers and designers.
Earlier this week, iDownloadBlog highlighted a similar app, Litur by Bezaleel Ashefor.
Although Litur is not available for the macOS and watchOS platforms, that app also allows you to use an iOS device’s camera (or your image library) to not only find and collect colors around you but also share them with others, create related palettes, etc.
But if you need a more feature-complete experience, Aurora is it.
Enter Aurora color picker
For starters, I asked Aurora’s creator Shihab Mehboob to explain to me what’s so different about his app that Litur and similar apps don’t already offer.
Here’s what he told me via email:
Aurora is better than any of its competition as it features far more details about colors, live color picking and replacing, code snippets that can be easily copied, dark mode support, context menus, Today extension, Watch app with palettes, Mac app with Touch Bar palettes and a beautiful UI with universal support and accessibility considerations.
So there you have it.
Find your favorite tint
The beautifully designed software is split into three distinct areas: the live color picker via the camera or your Photos library, color search and liked colors. Any of these can be tapped or clicked to view details. You can find and pick your favorite hue in ways more than one.
Firstly, you can get details about the hue from the iOS photo picker.
Simply select an image from the Photos library to load it into the app, then move the color picker around to read the underlying color value. It’s as simple as that, really.
And secondly, color details can be picked from the live camera which works the same using saved images — move the color picker to a precise spot that interests you to see the codes for the underlying color. Found a hue you like? Add it to Aurora by hitting the favorite button.
With multiple hues saved, you can create your own color sets. These custom tints can be saved in the app, shared with friends and family or imported back into Aurora at any time. The app automatically generates the following palettes for each of your captured hues: complementary, analogous, monochromatic, triadic and tetradic.
And saved hue can be further adjusted to your liking. Maybe that purple hue is too dark? No problem, you can adjust values like brightness and saturation to achieve desired results.
Expertly crafted and packed full of advanced features, Aurora is so much more than just the red, green and blue values (RGB) — you also get your HSV, CMYK, LAB and related Pantone and Crayola palettes, all in one place. And if you code for a living, Aurora will win you over with quick code snippets ranging from decimal RGB values to CSS code to Swift and beyond, making it super easy to copy and paste desired color definitions into your own code.
As mentioned earlier, Aurora is packed with other features.
I don’t have the time to go through all of them so I’ll briefly mention a handy Today widget for quickly viewing your last-used palette, Dark Mode support on iOS 13 and macOS Catalina, contextual menus, a standalone watchOS app with palettes, reviewing palettes on the Touch Bar of your Mac notebook as well as universal support and accessibility considerations.
Visit the official website for further details.
Pricing and availability
Aurora for iOS is available on App Store starting today, priced at $2.99.
Aurora for macOS is also $2.99 on Mac App Store.
Shihab kindly shared the following promo codes for the iOS and Mac editions of Aurora, but you have to be fast to redeem these in App Store or Mac App Store before anyone else.
- Aurora for iOS promo code: T3H3474RJWNJ
- Aurora for macOS promo code: 37N9WWNJJWPW
Are you liking Aurora so far? What’s your favorite color-picker for iOS?
Chime n with your thoughts in the commenting section down below.