views on hues

Happy Holidays update!

2009-12-31T14:58:00.003+01:00

Happy Holidays to all you ColorExplorer users out there!

It's been quite a while in the making, but I am happy to announce that a complete UI rework has been launched today, last day of 2009.

The new design features a much cleaner and more coherent visual style and appearance; including new tabs, centered fixed-width layout, and a much nicer front page.

As per request, it is now also possible to import colors from text-files (e.g. CSS and HTML files). Additionally, you may export your color palettes as clean PNG image files without text-overlays.

A few other new tools are also just about to be released, so stay tuned! :-)

Updates in the making

2009-08-30T00:32:00.003+02:00

It's been a while since I had the time to do some development on ColorExplorer, but now seeing the summer pass by and autumn knocking on the door, I'm ready to kick some new life into the project.

First off, you will soon experience a design fresh-up as the current navigation layout is pretty locked up making it hard to add new features and keeping them accessible.

The primary GUI elements will remain but most things will be rearranged and pretty much get tightened up. I hope you'' like it :-) Stay tuned!

"Oh yeah, let's rip off!" WTF?

2009-01-06T10:13:00.004+01:00

First of all; Happy New Years to all readers and users of ColorExplorer.com!

Due to some legal "set-backs" I have been forced to now remove both the PANTONE and NCS features. NCS required a paid license, which is just way too expensive at this stage :-(

Due to this set-back in features I chose to postpone the announced update as I am currently working on new "replacement" features. Stay tuned for update soon!

Nonetheless, ColorExplorer is seemingly popular, as some ass-hat over at Rent-A-Coder put out an offer to copy all features of my site. Jeez, wake up and do some creative thinking yourself, stupid!

Bye-bye ColorBlender

2008-11-08T21:12:00.000+01:00

Three and a half years after the launch of ColorBlender I have now sold the site and will now focus solely on the development of ColorExplorer.com.

With its easy-to-use color matching system, ColorBlender served me well, and served thousands of users well. Now, as you may know, the same feature set is still available at ColorExplorer.com - among lots of other tools, of course.

Updates - what are YOU expecting?

2008-10-16T13:00:00.004+02:00

The initial response to ColorExplorer has been overwhelming and I am so happy to watch the usage stats increase by the day.

I am already working on a bunch of new features and modifications to the current tools and user interface. I'm planning on publishing this "version 1.1" update batch in the beginning of November.

However, while I like my own ideas, I would love to know what YOU would like to see on ColorExplorer in the future. If you have any ideas you would like to share, please do post a comment to this post or drop me an email.

Two weeks - status

2008-09-27T11:03:00.004+02:00

It's now been just two weeks since ColorExplorer was officially launched. So what's the status?

I must say I'm very happy and impressed with the steadily increasing traffic and user profiles being registered, users submitting very positive feedback, and people starting to blog about the site.

Also, today I issued the very first "feature update" adding the ability to rename your saved palettes and also to clear all colors in the current palette (no idea how that one missed the initial release?! - but thanks to Suzanne Steel of Hot Steel Design for pointing that one out :-)

Mini-notebook support

2008-09-25T18:40:00.000+02:00

Ultra mobile PCs (UMPCs) or "netbooks" are just the major buzz around here at the moment with numerous players in the market, of course starting with Asus launching their EEE PC. Similar small form factor models are now also available from HP, Dell, MSI, Acer, and others.

Of course, I couldn't resist ... so I went for the Acer Aspire One, in my eyes providing the best "bang for the buck" with its very nice keyboard, Windows XP, 120 GB hard drive, and great looks.

So how has this anything to do with ColorExplorer? Well, all the current 9-10" models come with 1024 x 600 displays. So the question was; does ColorExplorer fit? It certainly does! The UI was designed to use maximum screen space available but fits nicely on a 1024 pixel wide display. The 600 pixel display height does make you scroll vertically in some of the tools, but I think you will become acustomed to that with such relative small screen space anyway.

Live at last!

2008-09-14T15:01:00.003+02:00

So, this is finally the day to launch ColorExplorer!

Today at 15:00 CET (3:00 PM) ColorExplorer.com finally made it to public release. I'm so happy to now have the site online, after more than 2 years of development.

Certainly, there is still more features and functions to be added in the future, but all-in-all I'm very satisfied with the current view and feel of the site. I find it clean and easy to use, no matter what your mission is; getting color palettes from images, converting various color systems, building palettes using the neat Color Matching features, or simply just playing around to find sweet color schemes.

So please go ahead and explore ColorExplorer.com - your feedback and comments are welcomed and appreciated here on the blog.

I sincerely hope that you will enjoy my work - at least just a fraction of how much I enjoyed making the site!

September 14th

2008-08-24T20:33:00.003+02:00

As the headline states, Sunday September 14th will be a very important day in the life of my ColorExplorer project.

At 15:00 (CET) the site will be officially launched and open to everyone.

There are still some tweaking to be done, some bugs to be fixed, and some features to be fine-tuned. However, this deadline is as much for myself to really focus on finishing up things and get the site "live".

As with all software there are always features and tweaks that do not make it to the first release. That's probably also the case with ColorExporer, but I really do believe that even at version 1.0 this site will be indeed very useful and unique in its feature set.

No doubt, the next few weeks prior to launch will be quite hectic but I am now really anxious to get ColorExplorer "out there" and I sincerely hope that you will be there when we go live!

Private beta running

2008-08-15T20:24:00.005+02:00

Yes, the private beta stage has begun! A select group of users have been invited to try out and test the features of ColorExplorer.

There is still work going on polishing the user interface and tweaking the features, but I expect to announce the launch date within the next few days. Right now, I am looking at a day somewhere in the very early September.

As usual with my project, new ideas keep popping up, but at this moment focus is on getting a fully functional (and more or less bug free) version online.

Stay tuned for launch date!

Closed beta to go live very soon

2008-07-16T12:57:00.000+02:00

The horrible "summer weather" here in Denmark has allowed me to make some serious progress in the process of reaching beta stage with ColorExplorer.
Most of the site framework has been ported from the initial Classic ASP and MySQL to ASP.NET and MS SQL; Yahoo YUI has been used for nice client side scripting; and a bunch of new ideas has sprung to life.
I hope to be able to open for a closed beta stage within very short time (a few weeks from now). After a closed beta period of 3-4 weeks, the site should be ready for public beta.

Are we there yet?

2008-05-16T08:28:00.000+02:00

It's been quite a while since I published my first color matching tool, ColorMatch 5K - it's been 8 years actually. The tool is still online (and well) but is steadily loosing traffic to my increasingly popular "alteration", namely ColorBlender.

With the huge amount of positive feedback I have received on ColorBlender during the last years I have felt extremely inspired to do some more development in the same genre. That's why I during the last 2 years have been prototyping (on and off) a brand new color oriented web site.

The new site, named ColorExplorer, is not yet ready for public display but it is now so far into development that I have decided to speak about it publically :-)

This blog will serve to inform about the development progress, announcements with regards to public beta, and of course final release.

ColorBlender won a Seomoz Web 2.0 Award!

2008-07-01T13:03:00.000+02:00

In 2006 ColorBlender.com received an Honorable Mention in the Web 2.0 Awards presented by Seomoz.org. Now, in 2008 it got even better as the site was announced the winner in the "Visual Arts" category! Just awesome, and better inspiration to get ColorExplorer up and running is hard to imagine.
A huge thanks go out to everyone supporting and using ColorBlender!