As always, cheers for the support, and if you have any issues or feedback, let me know on GitHub.

New features

• Japanese localization — Pika now supports 日本語 (Japanese), bringing the total to 9 languages

Updates and bug fixes

• Full menu translation parity — every storyboard menu item (45 in total) now has an explicit translation in all 9 languages; Spanish in particular previously had ~30 entries with English placeholder values
• Localized macOS menu bar — fixed an issue where the app menu bar didn't translate to Croatian (#204)
• Localized clear-history dialog — the Cancel and Clear buttons in the "Clear history" confirmation now translate (#205)
• Localized window titles — the About, Help, and Preferences window title bars now translate to the system language
• Translation parity — German, Spanish, French, Polish, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese brought to full parity with English across all UI strings
• Consistent window styling — Preferences and Help windows now use the same transparent titlebar as About
• Croatian translation polish — refreshed with community updates
• Colour name refresh — updated the bundled colour name database
• Translation correction — fixed Traditional Chinese "Copy foreground" which was mistranslated as "Pick foreground"

As always, cheers for the support, and if you have any issues or feedback, let me know on GitHub.

New features

• Named palettes — Save, rename, and manage multiple colour palettes with a tab bar and keyboard navigation
• Colour preview pill — A floating "Aa" pill shows your foreground colour on your background colour, toggled with P
• Swap + preview button — Unified swap and preview controls that sit side by side, with hover interactions

Updates and bug fixes

• Redesigned preferences — Wider layout, refined dropdowns, new visualisation header, and fade-in shader
• Improved translations — Added missing Chinese locale keys, fixed corrupted encoding, and added per-entry English comments
• URL triggers — New compliance and preview URL triggers with full localisation support
• Palette animations — Directional slide transitions, fixed delete/save selection tracking, and smoother navigation
• Help and drawer polish — Updated dividers, gradient overlay fixes, and tooltip keyboard shortcuts
• GitHub Actions hardening — Added Dependabot, bumped actions, and hardened CI security

As always, cheers for the support, and if you have any issues or feedback, let me know on GitHub.

New features

• Color history — A horizontally-scrolling drawer shows your last 20 color pairs. Toggle it with the clock button in the toolbar or Cmd+Y. Tap a chip to restore both colors; right-click for options to apply foreground or background individually, swap and apply, remove, or clear all. The active chip highlights when your live eyedroppers match a history entry, and state persists across launches
• Help view — A new Help window (accessible from the menu) documents all keyboard shortcuts, copy formats, and URL triggers in one place
• Expanded URL scheme — 12 new pika:// triggers for setting colors (pika://set/foreground/<hex>), controlling the history drawer, opening windows, resizing, and forcing light/dark/system appearance
• Spotlight search keywords — Pika now surfaces in Spotlight for searches like "Color Picker", "Color Contrast", and "WCAG" (thanks @alexkaessner!)

Updates and bug fixes

• Fixed color accuracy — Colors are now stored in sRGB instead of the display's ICC profile color space, eliminating the 1–3 value drift per channel that could occur when picking colors
• OKLCH and LAB formatting — Trailing zeros are now stripped from values (e.g. 0.5000 → 0.5, 0.0000 → 0)
• Status bar context menu — Rebuilt with all keyboard shortcuts: Pick, Copy, System picker, Swap, Preferences, and Quit
• Undo/redo for history — Full undo/redo support with ID-based history tracking, so picking and undoing doesn't create duplicate entries
• macOS 26 compatibility — Fixed splash window titlebar transparency on macOS 26
• Chinese localization — History strings are now fully localized in Chinese

As always, cheers for the support, and if you have any issues or feedback, let me know on GitHub.

New features

• OKLCH color format — Added OKLCH (Oklab cylindrical) as the 7th color format option, with full sRGB → Linear RGB → LMS → Oklab → OKLCH conversion pipeline
• Compact format picker — Replaced the segmented format picker with a dropdown menu to accommodate the additional format

Updates and bug fixes

• Smaller minimum window width — Reduced from 570 to 480, taking advantage of the more compact picker
• Improved color space accuracy — Force sRGB color space in OKLCH and LAB conversions so linearization and matrices match the actual color space
• Fixed keyboard shortcut labels — Corrected LAB and OpenGL labels in the keyboard shortcut grid to match the menu order

As always, cheers for the support, and if you have any issues or feedback, let me know on GitHub.

New features

• Croatian localization
• Polish localization
• General internationalization improvements

Updates and bug fixes

• fixed a bug where the order of "LAB" and "OpenGL" menu items were incorrect

As always, cheers for the support, and if you have any issues or feedback, let me know on GitHub.

New features

• Color overlay after picking: When you pick a color, Pika now displays a color overlay showing your selected color, providing immediate visual feedback
• Customizable overlay settings: Control whether the overlay appears and how long it stays visible through new settings (default: enabled, 2 second duration)

Updates and bug fixes

• fixes a bug with the settings window that caused text to get cut off in macOS Tahoe

As always, cheers for the support, and if you have any issues or feedback, let me know on GitHub.

New features

• APCA contrast algorithm: Implemented APCA (Accessible Perceptual Contrast Algorithm) as an alternative to traditional WCAG contrast calculations (it's in Settings)
• sRGB contrast calculations: More accurate contrast ratio calculations using the sRGB color space instead of standard RGB
• CIE-LAB color format: Full support for the LAB color space with proper conversion algorithms and display
• SwiftUI export support: Added SwiftUI format option for exporting RGB and HSB color values alongside existing CSS formats

Updates and bug fixes

• Increased minimum macOS deployment target to 14.0
• Expanded minimum window width to accommodate new features
• Simplified the touch bar for APCA and WCAG
• Improved localization support across multiple languages

Since 1.0.0, Pika has been available on the Mac App Store. The goal with releasing it on the Mac App Store is to give people the option to pay for it. You can still download it for free from the website, but if you want to support the development of Pika, now you can. You'll get the same releases as everyone else (minus the betas) and you'll know you supported indie app development. Everyone wins. You can find it on the Mac App Store right here.

As always, cheers for the support, and if you have any issues or feedback, let me know on GitHub.

Bug Fixes

• improvements to the system colour panel
• better support for colour spaces when using the system colour panel

Since 1.0.0, Pika has been available on the Mac App Store. The goal with releasing it on the Mac App Store is to give people the option to pay for it. You can still download it for free from the website, but if you want to support the development of Pika, now you can. You'll get the same releases as everyone else (minus the betas) and you'll know you supported indie app development. Everyone wins. You can find it on the Mac App Store right here.

As always, cheers for the support, and if you have any issues or feedback, let me know on GitHub.

Bug Fixes

• fixes some dark mode issues
• fixes a bug where the Pika icon would display in the dock even when it wasn't supposed to (thanks for flagging, @heitorgn!)

The goal with releasing it on the Mac App Store is to give people the option to pay for it. You can still download it for free from the website, but if you want to support the development of Pika, you can pay for it on the Mac App Store. You'll get the same releases as everyone else (minus the betas) and you'll know you supported indie app development. Everyone wins. You can find it on the Mac App Store right here.

As always, cheers for the support, and if you have any issues or feedback, let me know on GitHub.

Updates

• Pika is now available on the Mac App Store

Bug Fixes

• fixes a bunch of minor inconsistencies and weirdness, mostly around window management

And it's all thanks to suggestions from @alexkaessner. Thanks for being great.

And if that wasn't enough, it also adds support for OpenGL colours (cheers @cadupuy), simplified and traditional Chinese translations (thanks @Ssssv11), and fixes a bunch of bugs throughout the app, including some issues with hovering, which seems to finally work how I'd expect in Sequoia (credit to @abinesan and @ajijoyo).

As always, cheers for the support, and if you have any issues or feedback, let me know on GitHub.

Updates

• simplified and traditional Chinese translations
• adds support for using the system colour picker alongside Pika
• adds support for OpenGL colours

Bug Fixes

• fixes a bunch of minor inconsistencies and weirdness, mostly around hover states

This release increases the number of keyboard shortcuts (and updates swap color to x to more closely match other design software), and adds the pika:// URL scheme so you can write more complex scripts to pick, format, and copy colors. You can learn more about it here (and thanks @Hydro8). It also adds a setting to have Pika show at launch (thanks @franciscolourenco).

As always, cheers for the support, and if you have any issues or feedback, let me know on GitHub.

Updates

• adds new keyboard shortcuts
• adds the pika:// URL scheme so you can write more complex scripts to interact with Pika
• adds a setting to show Pika at launch
• minor visual updates to settings

Bug Fixes

• fixes an issue with window rendering and maintaining state

As always, cheers for the support, and if you have any issues or feedback, let me know on GitHub.

Updates

• adds Spanish language support
• moves to "Settings", instead of "Preferences", as per macOS Sonoma

Bug Fixes

• fixes an issue where the Pika icon would wander out of the menu bar

Also, as a result of the changes to the way Pika handles updates, it needs to be downloaded ✨fresh✨, so you might find the download size is a little bigger than normal. My humble apologies, and we should be back to standard functioning updates from here on out. Phew.

As always, cheers for the support, and if you have any issues or feedback, let me know on GitHub.

Updates

• adds a link to give feedback in the navigation and menubar

Bug Fixes

• fixes broken auto-updater for first installs
• fixes broken link

It also adds German translation (massive thanks to @david-swift for submitting it) and fixes issues with launching at login on macOS 13 Ventura.

As always, cheers for the support, and if you have any issues or feedback, let me know on GitHub.

Updates

• adds the option to run Pika as a non-menubar app
• adds German translation

Bug Fixes

• fix for launch at login issue on newer versions of macOS

Need to export colors without any formatting? Well, now you can, with the newly simplified and consoliated preferences pane. Display and export colors for either CSS, design applications, or in an unformatted style. Works with text and JSON exports, too, so everyone wins!

The preferences panel has grown over time, and this update ensures it will continue to display (and be scrollable) should the display available be smaller than its height.

And finally, incredibly, Pika hasn't had undo / redo, which is silly, because it should. So this update adds it. Thanks to @sj26 for the suggestion.

As always, thanks for the support, and if you have any issues or feedback, let me know on GitHub.

Updates

• introduces a new default WCAG compliance layout
• adds an appearance preference section to manage the default WCAG compliance layout (so you can roll it back if you'd prefer)
• adds a preference for copying / displaying colors for either CSS, design applications, or in an unformatted style
• introduces a scrollable preferences panel for smaller displays
• cleans up the preferences view, consolidating menu items
• updates color names
• adds a preview colour to the preferences panel when showing the export options
• adds undo / redo (with ⌘ + z and ⌘ + shift + z respectively)

Bug Fixes

• fixes an issue when displaying French in the preferences panel
• fixes an issue with long text being truncated unnecessarily

Updates

• adds a toggle to copy the color on pick

Updates

• adds French language support
• adds the color space of your main display to the preferences, and uses it as the default option (if you haven't chosen another)
• adds toggleable color names (thanks to color-names)
• adds the ability to export data as text, and in JSON format
• adds a toggle to suppress the format of the color on copy (so no more pesky #)

Updates

• Simplfies the swatch design
• Updates and simplifies color copying
• Moves the color format from preferences to the toolbar
• Initialises color picking on the global shortcut / when showing Pika
• Removes the background on swatches in favour of a drop shadow, to improve consistency and readability
• Adds swap colors as a keyboard shortcut to both the menu, and to About

Bug Fixes

• Improves accessibility in the swatch component
• Adds the preferences shortcut to the right-click menu bar menu

Updates

• Support for the Touch Bar
• Localization across the UI, opening the doors to translations in future
• Adds the option to hide Pika while picking, via the main window menu
• Adds a button to quickly swap colours

Updates

• Support for HSL (alongside HEX, RGB, and HSB)
• Support for color spaces (like Abobe RGB, P3, and sRGB)
• The menu bar icon now has a right click menu to make it easier to quit (and open About / check for updates / jump to Preferences) without having to open the app
• Keyboard shortcuts for picking colors (⌘D and ⇧⌘D) and copying them to the clipboard (⌘C and ⇧⌘C), which you can find in About, with some sweet animations
• An option in Preferences to hide the menu bar icon (I'd recommend setting a global shortcut, but you can always access it by double clicking the app)
• Unlike here, HEX codes are now lowercase by default, for readability
• You can also now sign up to beta releases in Preferences, if you're comfortable with trading new stuff for rough edges

Bug fixes

• Fixes an issue on Big Sur where the settings menu would be greyed out until selected (still seems to need to be opened twice to show keyboard shortcuts, though)
• Fixes an issue where a single focus ring would display with keyboard navigation enabled (accessibility improvements are on the roadmap)
• Improves picker context menu icon display in dark and light modes
• Zeroes out values for HSB and HSL when pure white or black

• Fix for a tinsy, tiny bug that caused Pika to crash on startup if you had your colour profile set to HSB (thanks to @aussiegeek for catching it)

• Pika was a little pushy on startup, so this update ensures it's a more chill(wave) menu bar app

Bug fixes

• Code refactored, which is like a fresh coat of paint

• Fancy new splash screen on first startup, to help with initial settings
• A tidied about view
• Some new animations on startup

Bug fixes

• Fixes for macOS 10.15

• Whooo! Catalina support! You can now run Pika on macOS 10.15 Catalina
• Removed some code, tidied some things

Bug fixes

• Rewrote the buggy preferences view