All Things Patrick - Working Hard to be Lazy!

I haven't forgotten v2 of the Color Picker App & it's something I've been wanting to work on. Unfortunately I have other projects that pay the bills taking priority. I wanted to share a couple of ideas I've been toying with and get some feedback.

I'm planning to completely drop reliance on the X Library. I had toyed with the idea of doing some sort of flash based thing, but I'm thinking of using jQuery, YUI, or both instead.

I'm keeping the server side code PHP based and thinking of using Symfony, the Zend Framework, or something with user handling already built in - like Drupal (unlikely). Part of the reason for user logins is so people can submit/maintain color schemes.

I'm thinking of making it open source so people can host their own server full of color schemes. I'll pull out the Firewheel Design ColorBurn feed and make the color feed section pluggable so people could write their own plugins for other services or completely random color schemes.

I'm hoping to make the color schemes more dynamic, but I'm not quite sure how to go about wrapping color swatches. From what I remember v1 requires 4 colors (that's how many is in the ColorBurn widget). Most of the code is dynamic and simply loops through the array of color swatches, but the current floating & such will more than likely break if it doesn't have exactly 4 colors.

I'm wanting to set it up so that there will be more choices than just the 3 of default color order, light to dark, & dark to light. I'd like to set it up so that the color feed could specify which color belonged to which class category (i.e. page text, page background, etc) by default. Maybe even define a default reverse order. I will still have the light to dark & dark to light. I may include a default color order based on the order the colors are first added to an array in order to have yet another possible way of viewing the colors.

I'm wanting to add drag & drop as well as color wheel / RGB / hex color selector for each class.

I'd like to make it a full page view with a draggable/clickable icon to pop open the color picker app.

That last brings me to something I was thinking about, but considering all of the various possibilities I'm not sure how viable it would be. Call me crazy, but I think it'd be cool if people could include the color app js file and whatever external js libs were needed to their own site page. It would then scan through all of the html elements; make a list of elements, classes, and id's; and present them for possibly color changing/styling. The other possibility which might be better is for it to scan through the attached css files and only add the given css selectors to the list - thus giving the end user more control over what they were able to style.

This does cause problems with trying to automatically display color sets on a page. The end user would have to manually set all of the elements/classes/id's or css selectors and their resulting color set may be near completely useless to somebody else who's using different classes & id's.