And here we see the ultimate extension of the web designer's aesthetic into the realms of the absurd: colours, artfully chosen and arranged; a Flash (?) interface allowing exactly one interaction, of utter triviality. And because it would no doubt ruin the perfection of simplicity, nothing to explain what it's for, why it exists, what will happen if you click Reload, and so on. No doubt part of the reason the site is being so hammered at the moment is because people are reloading over and over, trying to make it do something different.
Very odd indeed. And not the good kind of odd. Just odd.
God forbid anyone ask you to figure something out without spelling out every little detail. Hang on, the site's creator isn't even asking you to do anything. He or she just put something out there. Perhaps they are not even the person who posted it to hn. And even its freeness and obvious toy-ness isn't enough to prevent shrill, shallow complaints from annoying people on hn.
There's plenty of feedback within the app. You click on something, it says copied. The dropdown is obviously a set of color formats. It was not terribly hard to figure out.
But no explanation of what the colours are for, where they're from, what happens if you hit Reload. My assumption was that there was some clever algorithm to choose a "nice" set of colours from a wide palette, not that it was little more than a single colour swatch.
As I said: too minimal.
Now, if someone did have a web app that would choose nice colours that go well together according to clearly-defined, documented algorithm, I'd be very happy with that. As long as there was some text somewhere to explain what it did.
I don't get why he would document what happens when you hit reload. The page reloads. The colors are all the same and can't be adjusted, so obviously it can't be met to be a means of choosing colors. Where did you even get these expectations from?
I had to check out the comment thread here to figure out what that page actually did. I'm still not clear on the purpose of the dropdown at the top? Is it supposed to load multiple pallets or something? If so it appears to be broken at the moment.
It's supposed to allow you to change the format that the colour is copied with into your clipboard, i.e. hex or RGB.
It's a shame really since it'd be relatively easy to fix. Off the top of my head you could change the text string for the default drop down to "Select a copy format". Moreover you could actually say "copied to clipboard" (or any suitable variations) when clicking on a colour / have some text on the page stating "Click on a colour to copy it to your clipboard".
I'm not sure if the site's creator changed the site since this post, but I believe the site is responsive. When expanded wide enough, I saw a "Why?" button that when clicked explained the site's purpose.
I do get your point. I have played around with the site and there's a part of it I still don't understand. :-/
I guess this is mass media gone nuts: When you aim for the lowest common denominator, but your target audience is every human being on the planet, you end up serving nothing at all.
It also doesn't seem to do anything. I click on stuff and it says "Copied!" but there's nothing in my clipboard. Unless I'm not understanding what "copy" means...
Very odd indeed. And not the good kind of odd. Just odd.