views on hues

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 :-)

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.

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!

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!

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!

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.

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!