Eye Dropper Tool Broken (for a decade!)

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
November 11, 2016
2 replies
669 views

The eye dropper tool in Flash/Animate used to be one of the most intuitive and handy tools available. You could click your Stroke or Fill swatches and choose a colour from the web-safe palette that opened up ... but beyond that, you could click to pick up ANY colour with the eye dropper, anywhere on the screen ... even outside of Flash/Animate!

At some point a long time ago ... can't remember when (maybe even pre-MX?) the eye dropper functionality was diminished, so that you could only pick up colors from within Flash/Animate.

Today, you can't even do that. The moment you move the eye dropper away from the colour swatches in the fly-out panel, the swatch toggles seemingly randomly between two shades of dark grey.

Every few years, i bring this up to the development team. i've submitted bug reports about it before. Is this the year the team fixes it, and restores this incredibly useful functionality? i dunno. If so (and i'm not holding my breath), i'm dismayed it's taking this long.

- Ryan

This topic has been closed for replies.

U

Untold Entertainment Inc.Author

Inspiring

Ah yes ... this whole time, i thought i was running the latest version. Couldn't figure out why it was still called Flash, and not Animate.

Now that i've updated, i can see that it's been mostly fixed. That's great! What's the likelihood of getting it entirely fixed, so that the colour picker will grab any colour from anywhere on the screen (even outside Flash/Animate), as it used to?

- Ryan

Colin Holgate

Inspiring

The current version does seem to pick up any color from anywhere, with the drawback and solution I mentioned.

If you go back in history far enough I bet there was a time when Flash Pro could force the system to not do anything at all until the eye dropper was done. In those days it would have been possible to prevent the system from switching to the application under the cursor, but it hasn't been that way for a long time.

U

Untold Entertainment Inc.Author

Inspiring

On my machine, it doesn't work. And i just realized i'm not actually talking about the eye dropper - i'm talking about clicking the Stroke or Fill colour swatches in the Tools panel.

If i click the Fill swatch and move the cursor outside of the application, it picks up (without clicking) sort of the first colour it cottons onto, but then the swatch is no longer "live" and it gets stuck on whatever colour that was.

Try it - minimize Animate, and then click on the Fill swatch. Move your mouse cursor outside Animate. It'll reliably grab a colour. But then roll over anything else, and the swatch won't budge.

As i said, in much earlier versions of the software, that swatch would remain live, and you could just grab a colour from anywhere (and Flash/Animate would eat the click).

So this question is not answered, and functionality still falls short of what it once was. It got broken years ago, and was never fixed.

Asymetrical

Inspiring

I agree I miss the ability to eye dropper anything on the screen but for what it's worth it at least works in the latest release. I've bugged the developers for months about it.

Colin Holgate

Inspiring

In the current version you can click anywhere to get a color, but that click still goes through, and you may end up switching to another application. In the current version, and all recent versions, you can press Return to select the color under the cursor. That has the advantage of not switching to the other application, but the possible drawback of setting the timeline playing.

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