Shade is a new app that dropped on the App Store a few days ago that will let you quickly and easily grab a color from the world around you with your iPhone’s camera for just $0.99! With a snap of your wrist and a few taps on the screen it will give you the average RGB and CMYK values of anything you can point your iPhone at; it can just as easily pull an image from your library and basically do the same thing. You can even get the average color value for screenshots which can be a neat thing to look at different themes you might be comparing. From the ground up the app is designed and built with beauty and easy of use in mind.

When you first open Shade you are greeted with the beautiful minimalism embodied in the main screen of the app. You are presented with only three buttons on the menu bar at the bottom, which from left to right take you to “Color History”, “Photos” and “Camera” respectively. This is all you need in the app and it’s great he hasn’t weighed it down with extraneous fluffy features that most users won’t need just to charge a higher price. It is all too common these days to either overpack an app with tons of features that only a few will use but everyone would have to pay for, at just $0.99 cents Shade hit the price mark on the head.

You have the ability to save as many colors as your device has room for, which from my conversations with the developer, is a whole heck of a lot of colors. He sort of laughed at my question when I asked. You can name colors and they are timestamped for convenience, however, I am unsure weather or not he plans on incorporating any more sorting or filing functionality. For heavy users this may be ideal, but I am sure if there are people requesting it he wouldn’t mind adding it in.

This is the developers first paid app he has submitted to the App Store after developing a few pretty awesome tweaks such as Boxy, Boxy 2 and Sticky, which I reviewed a little bit ago. So go and welcome him to the ranks of App Store developers by showing your support for his first app. Or if you don’t necessarily need it you could always gift it to someone for the holidays?

Also, stay tuned for an interview with the developer coming out soon as it’s a really good one!