DeriveColorsFX

This is not a serious application. Its a small tool where I just played with the method Color::deriveColor provided by JavaFX. Also its about playing with packaging and with modules.

What is it?

• It lets you pick any color, either from the JavaFX color picker or with a pipette from your visible screen and any background color you like.
• Then it uses the Color::deriveColor function to create new colors based on a selected source color.
• To create a new color the parameters hue, brightness, saturation and opacity are adjustable.
• Slider controls are used for parameter adjustment and the slider control background is used as an interactive preview.
• Previews are created where the source color, the derivative color blended with the background and the background color are displayed.
• Eventually, sets of colors can be saved to *.json or *.csv files. For JSON serialization, the Jakarta JSON-Bindings API (jakarta.json.bind-api) in version 2.0 is used. Its just an experiment how this works. For CSV I was playing with Reflection in order to mimic how the JSON-B adapter worked until I found com.opencsv:opencsv:5.5.2. Well but there I was not yet successful in getting it working the modular-way. OpenCSV is actually very comfortable to use, its just not yet modularized. Hence some work still ahead.

Things that dont work as expected:

• Well, the color pipette has currently an issue on MacOS (but most likely on any other system with HiDPI scaling). The app creates screenshots for each screen using the javafx.scene.robot.Robot().getScreenCapture(...) function. Then, the screenshot is displayed in a stage for each screen. Unfortunately, on MacOS with Retina display, the image turnsout to be blurry as it is only half of the required resolution - don't know yet whats wrong there. Most likely I am using the API in a wrong way and yup, need to read here.
• OpenCSV is not yet working due to lack of a module descriptor.

Screenshots

Running the app without packaging

As the Maven-JavaFX plugin is used, the app can be launched as:

> git clone https://github.com/Oliver-Loeffler/DeriveColorsFX.git
> cd DeriveColorsFX
> mvn javafx:run

Install on Windows

• ensure that any Java-17 JDK is available, e.g. from https://adoptium.net/
• ensure that your command line environment has access to all the JDK17 command line tools such as Jlink, JPackage, JDeps etc.

> git clone https://github.com/Oliver-Loeffler/DeriveColorsFX.git
> cd DeriveColorsFX
> mvn package
> win-package.bat

• win-package.bat will create an MSI installer located in target/win-installer
• Alternatively, a pre-built MSI can be downloaded from https://fx.raumzeitfalle.net/downloads/derivecolors/DeriveColorsFX-1.0.0.msi

Install on MacOS

• Download and Install at least Java-17, e.g. from https://adoptium.net/
• Ensure that the new JDK is available on your command line.
• ensure a recent version of Maven is installed (3.8+)

# First list all installed JDKs - JDK17 should be listed there
% /usr/libexec/java_home -V

# In case multiple JDKs are installed, switch to 17.
% export JAVA_HOME=`/usr/libexec/java_home -v 17`

# clone the project from Github
% git clone https://github.com/Oliver-Loeffler/DeriveColorsFX.git
% cd DeriveColorsFX
% sh mac-package.sh

• mac-package.sh will execute the Maven build followed by jlink and jpackage so that eventually a PKG image will be available in target/mac-installer.