Wednesday, January 17, 2007

r.a.d.color in Q1 2007?

In a blog post this Monday, Martin Ivanov of the telerik UX (User Experience) team revealed a new color picker control that will be part of Sitefinity 3 when it is released on February 28th. There has been cry from the telerik developer community for quite some time to have telerik introduce a usable, cross-browser, color picker control, but up until now we have seen no indication that they were preparing a control to fill this need.


The control revealed will be standards compliant, light-weight, and feature a 48 color "web safe" palette. It appears that a number of client-side events are being built into the control (such as OnLoad, OnKeyUp, and OnBlur), but there is no indication of what (if any) server-side properties and events could be added.

The control will come with Beginner (color picker only) and Advanced (color picker and textbox for entering custom colors) modes, but it will not ship with an "advanced" color picker that will allow users to picker a color the much wider palette of colors than can be safely displayed on the web. This is a bit strange since most color pickers available today offer some form of advanced palette color selection, but for most scenarios the smaller palette should be fine (especially if developers can define the colors on the default palette).

Telerik has yet to comment on whether we'll be seeing a version of this control in the r.a.d.controls suite (maybe as r.a.d.color or r.a.d.picker or r.a.d.colorpicker?), but the foundation for the control seems to exist. And if you've already got the foundation, why not make many developers happy and throw it in to Q1 2007? If only it were that easy...

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