Once I Was Wild

Pika 1.6.0 brings named palettes, a new colour preview pill, and a refreshed preferences layout — plus a bunch of polish and bug fixes under the hood.

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

Stay With The Horses

Stay With The Horses is a bug fix and polish update for the palettes beta.

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

New features

• Compliance and preview URL triggers — Control compliance and colour preview visibility via pika://compliance/show|hide|toggle and pika://preview/show|hide|toggle

Updates and bug fixes

• System colour picker history fix — Changing colours in the system colour picker now updates the current history entry in-place, instead of leaving it unchanged
• Updated help — The help window now includes the new compliance and preview URL triggers

Flood

Flood introduces palettes — a long-awaited way to save, name, and organise your colour pairs — along with a redesigned settings panel.

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

New features

• Palettes — Save, name, and switch between collections of colour pairs using the new tab bar, with full keyboard navigation and export support
• Colour preview pill — See your foreground colour on your background colour with a floating preview pill, toggled with P
• Preview toggle — Quickly show or hide the colour preview from the toolbar

Updates and bug fixes

• Redesigned settings — Refreshed preferences layout with a wider window, polished dropdowns, and fade-in shader visualisation
• Improved swap and preview animations — Smoother directional transitions when switching palettes and swapping colours
• Locale fixes — Added missing Chinese localisation keys and fixed corrupted encoding in zh-Hans and zh-Hant
• URL trigger translations — Added localisation support for URL-based colour triggers

Today We're The Greatest

This beta introduces a new color preview mode that shows your foreground color on your background color, making it easy to see how your selected colors work together in context.

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

New features

• Color preview mode — A floating preview pill shows sample text in your foreground color on your background color, so you can see at a glance how they pair together
• Preview toggle button — New eye icon in the toolbar to quickly toggle the preview on and off (also available via the P keyboard shortcut)

Updates and bug fixes

• Smoother app launch — History colors are now restored immediately on startup, removing the awkward animated transition to the last-used colors
• Chinese locale fixes — Added missing localization keys and fixed corrupted encoding in Simplified and Traditional Chinese translations

Hot Scary Summer

Hot Scary Summer is a big one. Color history lands as the headline feature, giving you a scrolling drawer of your last 20 foreground/background pairs — tap any chip to restore both colors instantly. Alongside that, there's a new Help view, a greatly expanded pika:// URL scheme, a fix for color accuracy drift, and a pile of interface polish throughout.

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

Alligator Bites Never Heal

Beta 4 brings color history — a persistent timeline of every color pair you've picked, so you can pick freely without worrying about losing a combination you loved.

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

New features

• Color history — Pika now keeps a scrollable history of up to 20 color pairs. Every time you pick a new color, it's automatically saved. Open the history drawer with H to browse your past picks as color chips, each showing the foreground and background together. Click any chip to restore both colors instantly, or right-click to apply just the foreground or background individually.
• Navigate history with arrow keys — When the history drawer is open, use the left and right arrow keys to step through your color history one entry at a time, keeping your hands on the keyboard.
• Undo and redo — Made a change you regret? ⌘Z undoes it and ⇧⌘Z redoes it. Undo and redo work across picks, swaps, and history navigation — so you can move around freely and always find your way back.
• Reorganized keyboard shortcuts — The About window now shows all shortcuts in a cleaner 5-column grid, including the new history and undo/redo actions.

I Love You, I'm Sorry

This beta adds a dedicated Help view to the app, making it easier to discover keyboard shortcuts, URL triggers, and colour formats — as well as a refreshed About window and a matching help page on the website.

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

New features

• Help view — A new Help window (available from the menu) with a scrollable reference covering all keyboard shortcuts, URL triggers, colour formats, and open source info

Updates and bug fixes

• About window — Refreshed to use consistent link styling with the new Help view, with shorthands instead of icons
• Keyboard shortcut grid — Reorganised into a more balanced layout

Werewolf

A small bug fix beta addressing colour values not updating when switching colour spaces in preferences.

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

Updates and bug fixes

• Colour space reactivity: Colour values now update immediately when changing the colour space preference, rather than requiring a hover to trigger a refresh.

I Don't Keep A Record

This beta fixes an issue where picked colours could be inaccurate by a few values, depending on your display's colour profile.

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

Updates and bug fixes

• Improved colour accuracy — Pika now normalises all picked colours to sRGB immediately, fixing a bug where hex values could drift by 1–3 channels on wide-gamut displays (fixes #187)

Upside Down Mountain

Pika 1.4.1-beta1 is a maintenance release focused on code quality, improved animations, and better formatting across the board.

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

Updates and bug fixes

• Smoother hover animations — Improved button expand/collapse animations with cooldown and cancellation guards to prevent flicker
• Better OKLCH precision — Reduced chroma decimal places from 4 to 3 for cleaner output
• Improved LAB formatting — Added proper spacing to unformatted LAB output and fixed closing parenthesis formatting
• Code quality improvements — Refactored color extensions, resolved SwiftLint violations, and cleaned up the codebase