Pika for Mac

Pika 2.0 is the biggest release so far. There's a brand new colour picker built from scratch, with a loupe that magnifies the pixels under your cursor and shows contrast and colour names live as you move. Colour values can finally be clicked, typed, scrubbed and stepped with the arrow keys. Names now come from color.pizza, wide-gamut colours stay true in Display P3, and a new first-run setup gets everything configured.

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

New features

• The Pro picker — A new colour picker, built from the ground up. A magnified loupe shows the exact pixel under your cursor, with contrast and colour names updating live. Arrow keys nudge a pixel at a time (hold ⇧ for ten), Return commits, and Escape cancels. It's opt-in and needs Screen Recording permission. The macOS sampler is still there as the Basic picker.
• Loupe themes — Choose how the loupe looks in Settings. Lens engraves the readouts around the rim, Badge angles them alongside, and Card stacks both colours with their values and names.
• Editable colour values — Click any readout to type a value, or paste a hex (with or without #, including 3-digit shorthand). Drag across a component to scrub it, or two-finger scroll, and drag vertically to change how precisely it moves. ↑/↓ step values, with ⇧ for bigger steps and ⌥ for finer ones. Escape reverts, and everything is undoable with ⌘Z.
• Colour names from color.pizza — Choose from a range of name lists that refresh on their own. A bundled list keeps names working offline.
• First-run setup — A welcome screen for setting your global shortcuts, choosing a picker, granting permissions and turning on launch at login.
• Pick-pair shortcut — Pick a foreground and background in one go with ⌥⌘D, changeable in Settings → Global Shortcut.
• Show Pika (⌘0) — A new Window menu item brings the main window back after you've closed it. ⌘N works too.
• Refraction app icon on macOS 27 — Thanks to Alexander Käßner.
• LAB in Copy as text and Copy as JSON — Both exports now include every colour format.

Updates and bug fixes

• Wide-gamut colours are no longer clipped to sRGB. With Display P3 selected, vivid colours keep their exact values, and pika://set uses your selected colour space.
• Long colour values wrap instead of being cut off, and stay a stable size while you edit or scrub them.
• OpenGL and SwiftUI values show at most 4 decimal places, so the readout, the editor and Copy all agree.
• Legible on-colour text — Text drawn over a colour picks black or white by WCAG contrast throughout the app.
• APCA contrast is calculated in sRGB, so it agrees with WCAG whatever colour space you've chosen. Greys show an OKLCH hue of 0.
• Better VoiceOver support — Compliance badges say Pass or Fail, and every button and control has a label.
• Fully localised — Everything new in 2.0 is translated across German, Spanish, French, Croatian, Japanese, Polish, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
• Fixed — Pika's window not coming back after closing it in Dock mode with the menu bar icon hidden, or after a pick from another app with "Hide Pika while picking" on.
• Fixed — The system colour picker not appearing when opened while Pika was in the background.
• Fixed — Copy, pick and swap doing nothing in popover mode until the popover had been opened once.
• Fixed — Clicking a shortcut recorder turning it into a text field.
• Fixed — "Hide shadow while picking" now keeps a crisp window edge at rest.
• Fixed — Selecting a colour no longer flashes white before animating to the new one.
• Fixed — An invalid hex string no longer crashes Pika.
• Fixed — Cmd+Tab reaches the system app switcher while a pick is in progress.
• Fixed — Machines on exactly the minimum macOS version are now offered updates.