Eye Dropper Tool Broken (for a decade!)

[Untold Entertainment Inc.]

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

[Asymetrical]

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]

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.

[Untold Entertainment Inc.]

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]

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.

[Untold Entertainment Inc.]

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.

[Colin Holgate]

Your use of the word "minimize" helped. If it's failing for you, it may be a Windows specific issue that isn't solved. It works fine on Mac.

[Untold Entertainment Inc.]

i said "minimize," but i may have meant ... "windowfy"?  Whatever makes it so that you can see other programs behind and around the active one.

[Colin Holgate]

Minimize was the right word, but you would only be doing that to then see other application on WIndows. On Mac minimize completely shrinks the window into the Dock (the equivalent of the task bar). If you want to see more of other applications on Mac you just resize the window.

So, I only meant that because you described how to reproduce the issue it also let me know that you're using Windows and not Mac, and the problem may still be there for you even if it's not for me.

[Untold Entertainment Inc.]

Here: this is what i'm talking about.

i have a rainbow image open in Chrome. Animate is in front, minimized. i click the Fill swatch, and move my mouse cursor outside Animate, over the green band (no clicking). With a small delay, Animate grabs the green colour and changes my Fill swatch. But as i mouse over the other colours in the image (in this case, blue), the Fill swatch doesn't update. It stays on green.

And it used to update. That's what i'm trying to say. This functionality worked once, long ago, and doesn't any more. And i must be the only one who cares?