Magpie picks colors, and the magnifier grows up

Magpie has had a magnifier since the first release: the loupe that appears while you drag a selection so you can see which pixel you're actually on. Magpie 1.5 takes that loupe, rebuilds it, and hangs a whole new tool off it.

The color picker (⌥⇧C) puts the magnifier under your cursor anywhere on screen, in any app and on any display. Click a pixel and its color goes straight to your clipboard. Nine formats to choose from, from plain hex through RGB, RGBA, and HSL to the percentage variants, and Space cycles them without leaving the picker. Hold ⇧ while clicking to stay in the picker and read a whole palette in one pass, or nudge a pixel at a time with the arrow keys when you're chasing a hairline border.

Every pick is kept. The last eight sit in a strip in the menu bar, one click from being copied again, and the full list lives in Capture History under a new Colors segment, where you can switch the format across the entire list at once. A palette you picked as hex comes back out as CSS without re-picking anything.

It's free. No license, no trial clock, same as the everyday screenshot tools.

The magnifier, rebuilt

Adding a color picker made the old loupe's shortcomings obvious, so it got the rework it needed, and every change lands in area selection too, not just the picker.

The hairline cross through the middle is gone. In its place is a single square that fits the pixel under your cursor exactly, drawn in black over a light pixel and white over a dark one, inside a plain grey ring that never changes. It went from being the loudest thing on screen to something you can actually aim with.

It also stays still now. The square used to drift around the centre as you moved, because the magnified image slid smoothly while the square could only land on whole pixels. The loupe snaps to the pixel grid, so the image steps under a square that doesn't move. It zooms twice as far as it used to, and holding ⇧ while you scroll changes the zoom live. The value you settle on is the one you get next time.

By default the picker's magnifier sits on your pointer and replaces it, so the pixel you're reading is the one under your hand. Area selection keeps it beside the pointer, where it doesn't cover the edge you're dragging toward. Both are settings, so swap them if you disagree.

Three fixes worth calling out

If you ever magnified a terminal and got a blank window instead of your text (sometimes, not always, and worst when the terminal was the active app), that's fixed. It affected the measure tool and guides as well.

The pointer no longer reappears on top of the magnifier part-way through a pick. Moving over a text field or a link makes the app underneath assert its own cursor, which was overriding Magpie's; the magnifier now notices and puts it away again.

And the first screenshot after Magpie has been sitting idle is no longer slower than the ones after it. macOS was napping the app between captures, so that first hotkey press spent its time waking the process up rather than capturing.

Magpie is still $9.99 one time for 3 Macs, with a 14-day full trial, and screenshots (and now the color picker) free forever after that. Grab it from the Magpie page or with Homebrew: brew install --cask skulkworks/tap/magpie. Full details are in the changelog.