Update, Nov 20th: this post now available on my blog!
I use the Freeform app quite a lot for doodling on my iPad. It’s not a perfect app, but it works for my needs, those needs being “recapturing that childhood habit of idly doodling on grid paper”. However, I’ve noticed something that I now can’t un-notice.
There are five colors available in the Markup toolbar — red, yellow, green, blue, and black.
There’s also a color picker pop-over, which by default also has five swatch colors — again, red, yellow, green, blue, and black.
However, as the observant among you may have already noticed:
These are not the same colors.1
Compare the toolbar colors (top) to the popover colors (bottom):
I thought at first that this might be some mis-handling of color spaces, as Apple displays generally use Display P3 and a mis-conversion between sRGB and Display P3 felt plausible? ...but playing around with the colors I couldn’t get them to line up in a manner that might confirm that theory. If you’d like to poke around with it, the colors are as follows (as RGB triples in the P3 space):
| color | toolbar | popover |
|---|---|---|
| red | 232, 70, 74 | 235, 77, 61 |
| yellow | 247, 210, 84 | 247, 206, 70 |
| green | 121, 212, 117 | 100, 196, 102 |
| blue | 59, 124, 242 | 40, 95, 244 |
| black | 0, 0, 0 | 0, 0, 0 |
-
Okay, yes, the two shades of black are the same. Shush.
