Case Study

Swach

Swach is a robust color management tool for the modern age. It allows you to pick colors, arrange them into palettes, and get color suggestions. Swach supports MacOS, Windows, and Linux to allow a seamless experience across different work environments.

Challenge

There are many desktop color tools out there that do just one thing, but do it well like Contrast and others that do a lot of different things, but only run on MacOS like Sip. The goal with Swach was to create a robust, cross platform desktop app that encompassed the functionality of many popular tools, while working across not just MacOS, but also Windows and Linux.

Swach in dark mode showing the palettes screen

Solution

Building apps that work across MacOS, Windows, and Linux used to mean learning completely different tech stacks for each app, but now we can use Electron to build cross-platform apps using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Drawing on our Ember.js experience, we decided to leverage Ember Electron, an Ember addon for building Electron apps to create a seamless experience across all platforms.

Swach in light mode showing the palettes screen

Like Contrast and Sip before us, we decided Swach would be best as a menubar app. This is a fairly common practice for MacOS, but less common for Windows and Linux. Bringing this type of app to all platforms allows everyone to enjoy Swach unobtrusively, yet always have it accessible for quick color operations.

The color harmonies tab of Swach, showing a color wheel and color palette.

We wanted to ensure that Swach was a one stop shop for everything a designer might need when managing colors for a project. This includes storing individual colors, checking their WCAG contrast scores, organizing them into palettes, and even discovering new color combinations from a base color. Our color harmonies tab was inspired by Adobe Color and allows you to create new palettes by using a base color and calculating analogous, monochromatic, and other color harmonies for it.

Swach showing the contrast checker tab comparing colors and calculating the WCAG score.

Outcome

Users are now able to have a consistent color management experience across all platforms. Windows and Linux users can now enjoy the same functionality of many existing color tools that were only available for MacOS.

By leveraging Electron and Ember.js we were able to create a single codebase to support all platforms, saving a lot of development time building and maintaining multiple codebases.

Swach is free to download, so please try it out and let us know what you think!

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