colouro-sdk

v1.2.0

Published

2 years ago

Colouro app client SDK that providing easy client API for receiving color scheme and its changes.

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Colouro SDK

Colouro is a mobile app for creating color schemes with unique instant preview feature. This package provides SDK with tools utilizing the color scheme instant preview.

Installation

npm install -D colouro-sdk

Overview

At the moment there are basically three ways you can use instant preview:

colouro-reskin.js: Client-side JavaScript library for quick CSS experiments.
Pros:
- Quick and easy way,
- No dependencies, works in any modern browser, minimal configuration required.
Cons:
- The color scheme is not stored persistently.
- Does not support CSS processors (SASS, LESS) and their color functions.
colouro-sync Developer server-side tool.
Pros:
- Persistent: the last version of color scheme is saved on developer computer.
- Integrates well with CSS processors.
Cons:
- Requires a bit of configuration and SASS/LESS template to be created.
- Solution is Node.js-based, which may not be your cup of tea.
Low-level access via colouro.Client client.
Pros:
- You can plug Colouro instant preview into your unique workflow not limited to web-design.
Cons:
- You have to write some code to handle received color scheme RGB values and semantic.

Colouro Reskin

colouro-reskin.js is browser-side library providing simple CSS reskin feature. After installing colouro-sdk package the library is located in <project>/node_modules/colouro-sdk/dist/colouro-reskin.js

Getting started

Copy <project>/node_modules/colouro-sdk/dist/colouro-reskin.js file to your script location.

Include the colouro-reskin.js script in your HTML file like this:

 ...
 <head>
    ...
     <script src="colouro-resking.js"></script>
 </head>
 ...

Next define on-load function to be called when loading is finished.

...
<head>
    ...
    <script>
    function onLoad() {
            
        colouro.reskin({
            '#000000':0,  // original primary foreground color
            '#ffffff':1,  // original primary background color
            '#8bfe6f':2,  // original secondary foreground color
            '#141f4e':3,  // original secondary background color
            '#6b0e65':4   // original mid-ground color
        });
    }
    </script>
</head>
<body onload="onLoad();">
...

Replace the color values in defined mappings with your colors as defined in stylesheet.

Start Colouro app and open the connection dialog.
Load the HTML file in browser. In top-right corner there should be small frame with Colouro Host URL field. Enter the IP address as shown in connection dialog (without the http:// prefix) and click the Connect button.
Once the Colouro client gets connected to the app, the frame will disappear, and appears again if connection is lost.

Complete example

Following HTML snippet is minimal page example:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>Reskin Test</title>
    <style>
        html, body { margin: 0; }
        .major {
            font-size: 48pt;
            text-align: center;
            padding-top: 20vh;
            color: #000000;
            background-color: #ffffff;
            height: 30vh;
        }
        .minor {
            font-size: 48pt;
            text-align: center;
            color: #8bfe6f;
            background-color: #141f4e;
            height: 30vh;
            padding-top: 10vh;
        }
        .midground {
            height: 10vh;
            background-color: #6b0e65;
        }
    </style>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="js/colouro-reskin.js"></script>
    <script>
        function onLoad() {
            colouro.reskin({'#000000':0,'#ffffff':1, '#8bfe6f':2, '#141f4e':3, '#6b0e65':4});
        }
    </script>
</head>
<body onload="onLoad()">
    <div class="major">Lorem ipsum</div>
    <div class="midground">&nbsp;</div>
    <div class="minor">Lorem ipsum</div>
</body>
</html>

Colouro Sync

Colouro Sync is a tool for real-time synchronization of the colour scheme being edited in Colouro app. Each time color scheme is updated, it gets stored into defined file.

Getting started

Install colouro-sdk package into your node project:
```
npm install --save-dev colouro-sdk
```

Create template CSS/SCSS/LESS file like this (Sass example named scss/colors.scss.in):

 $primary-foreground:     {{fg-maj}};
 $primary-background:     {{bg-maj}};
 $secondary-foreground:   {{fg-min}};
 $secondary-background:   {{bg-min}};
 $middleground:           {{mg}};

In root of your project create colouro.json file with this content:

 {
     "host": "192.168.0.42:8080",
     "template-file": "scss/colors.scss.in",
     "dest": "scss/colors.scss"
 }

In your SASS/LESS stylesheets:
1. Include the file stated in dest field of colouro.json config,
2. Use color variables.
Run Colouro app on your handset, connected to same wifi as the computer with node project.
1. In the application open connect dialog and copy the address of your handset to value of host field of colouro.json file.
Open terminal and run following npm command in root of your node project:
```
npx colouro-sync
```
Run browser-sync task like gulp dev. Make sure that the generated file is watched for changes.
Tip: If you use gulp for building your project, you may omit the step 6 and run colouro-sync within gulp dev process. See Using with gulp section bellow for more details.

Template file syntax

In Getting started section we created simple Sass template without going into details. It may be easy to see that the template uses handlebar syntax with five named variables being expanded. These variables denote individual color purpose (semantic) as set in color scheme being edited in Colouro app.

{{fg-maj}}---major foreground,
{{bg-maj}}---major background,
{{fg-min}}---minor foreground,
{{bg-min}}---minor background,
{{mg}}---mid-ground.
{{fg-maj-bw}}, ..., {{mg-bw}}---black or white complementary color for given one (the one with higher contrast for better legibility.

`colouro.json` config file

Colouro Sync uses simple json config file being located in project root under colouro.json file with following fields:

host (string): IP address and port (always 8080) with Colouro app server running at handset, e.g. 192.168.0.1:8080
template-file (string): relative file path of template file to be expanded with current scheme colors, e.g. scss/colors.scss.in,
dest (string): relative file path of to be generated from template, e.g. scss/colors.scss,
verbose (boolean): turn the verbose mode on/off.

Version control

If your project uses some version control system like git, you may wonder what files you should store in your repository so other team members can use Colouro real-time preview (e.g. during brainstorming session).

To share the Colouro workflow, you should store following files in repository:

template file as stated in template-file field of colouro.json file,
generated file as stated in dest field of colouro.json file,
colouro.json file with configuration.

However storing colouro.json is recommend, there's stated a host with IP that may change frequently. To simplify version control, you can create colouro.local.json file in your project root with following content (replace the IP address with your handset address as displayed in Colouro app connect dialog):

{
  "host":"10.20.30.40:8080"
}

The colouro.local.json file should marked as ignored for your version system. In case of git you may add the file into your .gitignore like this:

echo colouro.local.json >> .gitignore

Using with gulp

There is a better way to setup your gulp-based workflow than running the npx colouro-sync command in own terminal window.

You may extend your gulpfile.js to make the colouro-sync functionality available right from gulp "files-watching-process".

There are just two simple steps:

At beginning of your gulpfile.js import a colouroSync function like this:
```
const colouroSync = require('colouro-sdk').colouroSync;
```
Call the colouroSync() in any task that gets executed (usually at place where browserSync is initialized).
For instance I'm used to workflow used by StartBootstrap templates. In this case the "files-watching" task is called dev. This task depends on browserSync task which is responsible for intializing the browserSync. That's the right place to initialize the colouroSync too like this:
```
// Configure the browserSync task
gulp.task('browserSync', function() {
   
  // NOTE: following line was added to initialize colouro-sync
  colouroSync();
   
  browserSync.init({
    server: {
      baseDir: "./"
    }
  });
});
```

Note that the example above still uses the colouro.json (and colouro.local.json) config files. All the config properties can also be passed to colouroSync function as object. See colouroSync JSDoc for more info.

Low-level Client API

The central component of Colouro SDK is a Colouro client implementation that you can utilize to plug the Colouro instant preview into you workflow.

Getting started

Following snippet shows minimal example of Client class usage, that will print status and received colors into console.

// Import Colouro SDK
// (only for node.js, omit this line in browser, 
// instead include the colouro-reskin.js in your HTML)
var colouro = require('colouro-sdk'),

    // Semantic name constants 
    semanticNames = ['primary fg', 'primary bg', 'secondary fg', 'secondary bg', 'mg'],
    
    // Colouro app host address
    colouroHost = '192.168.0.42',
    
    // Create client instance with given host and default port
    client = new colouro.Client({host: colouroHost + ':8080'})
        
        // Setup status changed callback
        .on('status', function(connected) { 
            console.log(connected ? 'Connected' : 'Diconnected'); 
        })
        
        // Setup color scheme recevied callback
        .on('colors', function(colors, semantics) { 
            console.log('Colors received');
            for (var i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
                console.log(i + ': ' + colors[i] + ' (' + semanticNames[semantics[i]] + ')');
            }
        });

If you run this script with correct Colouro host, you may see something like this (hit Ctrl-C to quit the script):

Connected
Colors received
0: #fcef7a (primary fg)
1: #284e4a (primary bg)
2: #b7fed4 (secondary bg)
3: #2b221e (secondary fg)
4: #ff2a1e (mg)

Notes:

As you can see the semantic (meaning of color) constants are in range 0..4, see the semanticNames in example above.
If connecting to Colouro host fails, the client will try to reconnect forever. Each time the connection fails or succeeds the status callback gets called.
If you want to stop the client, call client.close(), to start client again call client.init().

Published

Vulnerabilities

Links

Maintainers

Keywords

Readme

Colouro SDK

Installation

Overview

Colouro Reskin

Getting started

Complete example

Colouro Sync

Getting started

Template file syntax

colouro.json config file

Version control

Using with gulp

Low-level Client API

Getting started

`colouro.json` config file