Global Swatches creating wrong colors

Global Swatches is not working as I think it should. I go into the little swatch sample at the top and add 50 01 1 and the new swatch appears with a totally different number, 66 5 0.

What am I doing wrong?

And the swatches seem to change as I move through pages. Are they specific for one page?

Thanks

Apart from the 01 should only be 1 anyway, there does seem to be a bug here. I was able to replicate it happening. The weird thing is, for me it doesn’t happen every time.

@Norm, possible bug?

Actually is there a problem with Catalina and swatches in general?
If I click on a colour sometimes it selects the swatch near it.

@Flashman?

Not sure. I am still on Mojave due to my ancient Mac Pro that won’t run Catalina without a lot of messing about.

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I was going to a start my own thread about this but see that it is already being discussed.

Since installing the newest version of Blocs+, I am having MAJOR problems with the behavior of color swatches:

  1. Swatches sometimes disappear completely
  2. Swatches sometimes suddenly “magically” change their color. Watch this screencast to see it in action: https://www.loom.com/share/af988a09d7c04e24b0c687d24e2e1658
  3. Swatches sometimes don’t get saved with the right color.
  4. Swatch default text (corresponds to hex number) is not shown correctly. For example: color of swatch: 484F67 Name that appears in swatch name: 474E68. See screenshot below.

These issues are not related to a specific blocs file. I am seeing this in all files since installing version 4. I have gone back to working in version 3, otherwise I can’t meet my deadlines.

I am currently running Catalina 10.15.7

Here’s another example of what’s happening with swatches:

This is why I’m going back to ver. 3. Ver. 4 is unusable for me, sorry!

That’s pretty messed up. I sometimes find that colours chosen in edit mode are not updated correctly in preview without restarting Blocs and that’s frustrating but not the same as you are seeing. I’d file a support ticket and send in the project files for testing.

The colour swatches are an area that I think is due for an overhaul. Not just because of occasional bugs but more generally there are ways it could be improved for productivity.

Bloc 4 saw a huge number of changes generally, so colour improvements may well arrive with 4.2 or 4.3. The issues you have seen are certainly not common though.

Yep, I’m having some of these problems intermittently also.
But I think i did in V3 as well.

Hi @gary, For me sometimes the swatches are a bit “bumpy” where I need to click twice on the colour to have it applied. But never had it as worse as you experience. I’ve noticed as well as changing the colours for background and text in the project settings make things worse. That’s why leave always on the preset colours. Secondly, I have started to create preset colour tabs for each project in apple colour picker. This seems to help, at least for me.

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I have about the same problem with the swatches as “gary”. When I have selected a block and want to change the background the old color has suddenly disappeared and there are two of the same colors in the global swatches window. (Not every time) I already found working with colors difficult in Blocs 3 and will never be proficient at it. In my opinion it’s not really easy to work with colors in “Blocs” but I think that’s up to me.

Hi @Jerry. I can get into that window with the pre-selected color tabs you call “Small Potato”. But to get into that window you first have to create a new color in the “Swatch Manager”.Is there any other way to get into that window so you can directly choose one of the pre-selected colors. I prefer to leave the “global swatches window” blank because it goes wrong every time.

I also thought of creating a Class for each background color separately.

Robert

I can confirm this issue, though it does seem to happen randomly. Annoying as hell though, especially if you don’t have a Backup of your Color Palette.

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Hi @LangheRob, As far as I’m aware there’s no way to open Apple colour picker without a “third party” I’m using a little, yet super handy tool called colorwell to create presets. The only downside is that your preset colour swatches are not automatically syncing over iCloud (Don’t ask me why though.). You will need to copy the presets manually around different computers. I posted earlier on how to do so:

@Jerry, I also have one of those tools with which I can compose a palette just not as fancy as “colorwell”. @pumpkin, I can save the palette, have a backup, so I don’t lose the colors if it goes wrong with the swatches in blocs. It looks perfect in “blocs” and it couldn’t be easier with the “global swatches” but it’s a pity that sometimes colors disappear.

I began working in Blocs v3 which I did not delete from my Mac. I am now experiencing the same exact problem in v3.

I am 95% sure this has something to do with installing ver4. Before I installed v4,v3 worked just fine, without any such problems. And my OS did not change. The only thing that is different is I installed v4.

Not sure Gary. I’m pretty sure I’ve always had this problem since I started using v3.

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I also had problems with the swatches in v3. Then I thought it was me. But once v4 was installed and the problems remained I started looking on the forum if others also had that problem. As far as I can find out it is fortunately only a few blocs users with this problem. I take it for granted because for the rest I have a lot of fun with blocs but if you use blocs for your profession I can imagine that it is very annoying. But I’m sure that when the time comes, this will get attention from “The Man” as well. :wink: