Android Color Picker

Recently, while putting together an Android project, I found that I needed a good dialog for the user to pick a colour. Not being a fan of reimplementing the colour-picker shaped wheel, I figured there had to be a decent colour picker out there that aligned with what I wanted from my colour picker.

What I found was that of course there was! While there were a number of colour pickers that allowed the user to pick a hex value from a grid, or show a large colour spectrum and have the user place a pointer at the point of colour they want, this wasn’t what I wanted. All I wanted was a simple colour picking dialog, similar to the one found in the stock Google calendar.

So I just used that one. The problem with this however was how unwieldy it was to include in my project. Instead of a standard gradle dependency or anything of the sort, all that there was was source code. Which is okay, I can build source code, I can include AAR files in my project. Not particularly easily, but I can do it.

But this made me think, others shouldn’t have to spend a few hours poring through the source to try and figure out what to build and how the component works, so why don’t I make things better than how they were, and put together a Gradle build for the colour picker, making the next person who needs what I did happier, and learning a little more about Gradle along the way maybe.

And so from that I created the build, spent a good amount of time figuring out JCenter, and got the library published.

So now if anyone needs the AOSP colour picker, all they need to do is go here. Or even just add the line

compile 'uk.co.jordanrobinson:android-color-picker:1.0.1'

To their Gradle file, add a small amount of code and boom:

Much easier than an AAR file, right?