{
  "id": 2318900,
  "title": "Tintbox: A Free Offline Colour Palette Generator for Designers and Developers",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/21/tintbox-a-free-offline-colour-palette-generator-for-designers-and",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-08-21T05:51:53.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/horizonsoftware/tintbox-a-free-offline-colour-palette-generator-for-designers-and-developers-5842"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Tintbox is a free Android application developed by Horizon Software using .NET MAUI technology. This app simplifies the process of finding colors for designers and developers by generating palettes based on real color theory. Users can input an exact HEX, RGB, or HSL value, or adjust sliders to achieve the desired shade. The app offers five color harmony types that complement the base color, allowing users to select from a variety of credible alternatives. Additionally, Tintbox enables users to extract palettes from photos or select a single pixel for precise color sampling.\n\nThe app prioritizes accessibility, incorporating a WCAG contrast checker that evaluates the contrast ratio of any two colors, providing clear AA and AAA pass/fail indications for both normal and large text. It also includes a color-blindness simulator to preview how palettes appear to individuals with protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia.\n\nTintbox streamlines the export process by converting palettes into 17 developer-friendly formats, such as CSS custom properties, SCSS, Less, Tailwind, JSON, W3C Design Tokens, and more. Users can even customize the output, adding semantic color names, altering hex casing, and adjusting indentation. While the core features are free, the app offers a limited number of formats; however, unlocking the entire set requires completing a short tutorial video. Alternatively, users can begin with one of the thirty pre-designed palette packs, including options like Coastal, Cyberpunk, Autumn Harvest, and Retro. Tintbox allows users to create a local library of palettes, which can be backed up and restored with a ZIP file. The app functions entirely offline, requiring no account or sign-up, and is available for free on Google Play.",
  "summary": "A quick look at one of the small Android apps I'm building solo, with .NET MAUI, under Horizon Software. Every designer and developer has done this: found a colour they like, then spent twenty minutes squinting at a colour wheel trying to work out what goes with it — and another ten converting the result into whatever format the project needs. Tintbox is a free Android app that collapses both…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}