RGBA Field

[iPhilip]

First of all, thank you for this tool. It looks useful.

I wonder about the RGBA field in the GUI. It suggests that you are able to detect the alpha channel. I looked through your code and the alpha channel is hard-coded to 1.0. (Should it not be 255 to be consistent with the RGB numbers?) In any case, given that it's hard-coded, I don't see value in having that field over the RGB field.

[akcansoft]

Thank you for the thoughtful question!
You're correct to notice that the RGBA field shows a fixed alpha value. Here's why:
Screen pixels don't inherently carry transparency information. Any transparency we see is created through compositing layers within applications, not from the pixel data itself. Detecting and analyzing these application-level layers would be extremely complex and unreliable.
Since the tool captures color directly from the screen pixels, the alpha channel cannot be determined. Therefore, it's set to 1.0 (fully opaque) as the only reliable value.

The RGBA field follows the CSS color standard (as defined in CSS Color Module), which uses the format: rgba(red, green, blue, alpha)
For example: rgba(255, 99, 71, 0.5)
Since we can't detect the actual alpha value from screen pixels, it defaults to 1.0 (100% opacity).

[iPhilip]

Thank you for the detailed explanation. I wasn't aware that there was an actual standard for color representation. ChatGPT suggests that there isn’t one universal standard but the format you chose is the most “globally understood” RGBA format.