ColorCache 4 is promoted as the colour designer's equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife, as it contains a whole host of different features in a relatively small and simple program. The program itself has been around for three years now, and is currently at version 4.01 so any bugs or problems have been well and truly ironed out. The aim is to have a product that is capable of quickly and easily gathering colour information and able to create matching schemes for use in graphics and design.

This 'Swiss Army Knife's' repertoire includes:

• Color Picker - The ability to harvest on-screen colours
• The ability to manage, store, and import / export colour schemes
• Easily generated colour schemes from a single base colour
• Creating new colour formulas
• Previewing and printing your colour schemes

Usually for me, gleaning a custom colour from a website or an image involves pressing the print screen key, then opening a program such as Photoshop to paste the image into a new document. I can then use the eye drop tool to find the colour's HEX value, so that I can replicate this. A fair amount of hassle just for six numbers! Not any more. With the ColorCache, I can use the Colour Picker and with a single key press, can create a magnifying glass next to my cursor and then just click anywhere on the screen to extract the colour information. Easy! Colours are either saved into the applications palette, or stored on your clipboard, ready to be pasted.

But this is just the start, as another cool feature I tried was the Palette Builder. This works by the user selecting a set colour, and watching as a list of different colour combinations for the one selected are displayed, from contrasting and harmonic colours, through to lighter or darker progressions and website colour schemes. Wow!! This can potentially save me so much time, especially for difficult colour schemes where no combination seems to work. Below is an example of the palette showing the combinations that are generated, depending on colour originally selected:

Pretty impressive and a very handy timesaver. One of the other features that really impressed as well is the ability to source colours from your own websites or others, by importing the relevant html and css files into ColorCache. The program then goes through and extracts the colours from the site and displays them, as well as their corresponding HEX codes into your colour palette. You can then create different colour variations from these to give your design a whole new feel. It's brilliant for when you have the layout right but are still unsure of the colour design.

Technology Lighthouse Software has produced what is a very handy tool for designers of any skill or background. The menu system is quite simple, though for someone just new to graphics or web development, using the help bar (which is thankfully very easy to follow) would be advantageous. This product gets a thumbs up from me because of its range of great features and the fact it certainly makes life easier in the realm of design. ColorCache sells for around $35 USD.