Getting a color into Affinity Publisher

[AdroitAndroid]

In other Mac desktop apps, moving colors around is a simple matter of drag and drop. When I want to use a color in Publisher that I've defined in another application (for example in Color Slurp), I expected to be able to drag the color swatch (a macOS term) from Color Slurp into the Color palette and just drop it on the circle showing the foregound color of the selected object.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work. I also have not had success dragging into the Swatches palette, or into the "Fill" and "Stroke" color wells in the toolbar. None of the color picker options in the popup button of the Color tab of the popover which opens when you click these color wells accept drags either.

The only way I've found to reliably import a color is to copy its RGB hex value, open the popover from the color well, select "RGB Hex Sliders" and paste the 6-character hex code into the # box. This is super cumbersome. 😞

Is there a way to drag and drop colors from other apps that I'm missing? If not, is there some simpler way to import a color from a color well elsewhere in macOS?

[Old Bruce]

12 minutes ago, AdroitAndroid said:

Is there a way to drag and drop colors from other apps that I'm missing? If not, is there some simpler way to import a color from a color well elsewhere in macOS?

Use the little eye-dropper in the swatches panel and click + drag over to the colour in the other thing.

[AdroitAndroid]

Oh, I see. Thanks for explaining how this works. It seems this only works if Affinity is the foreground app. If Affinity is taking up your whole screen, this approach won't work. When you switch apps to bring the other item to the foreground, the drag event ends. It also doesn't work to press Cmd while clicking Affinity in the background to start the drag event while the other application is in the foreground.

This is still quite cumbersome, because it will involve changing the size of the Affinity window. If there's another way, I'd love to hear about it.

[walt.farrell]

You can adjust your windows so the applications don't take the entire screen to allow picking from a different application's window. Or use a different screen.

However, there is some kind of an issue on macOS where some user's Affinity applications cannot color-sample outside the application window, even if they've granted screen-recording privileges to the Affinity application.