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Dab lives in your menu bar as a small dot, tinted to your last pick. Click it (or hit your pick hotkey), drag the loupe over any pixel, and click. The HEX is on your clipboard before you blink. No sign up, no account, nothing to grant.

Dab samples through Apple's system color picker and always converts to sRGB before it reads the values, so the HEX is right even on a wide gamut (Display P3) screen. It reads exactly what sits on the pixel you click. Pickers that skip that step are the ones that drift on wide gamut displays.

Yes. Open Settings, then Shortcuts, and bind global hotkeys to pick a color, open History, show your last pick again, or copy the last color. They work system wide and need no extra permissions.

It's built for it. Dab can preview palettes through deuteranopia, protanopia, and tritanopia, flag colors that clash, and, for color blind users themselves, name the true color and read it aloud, including a heads up when a color sits on your confusion line (looks green, actually red).

Picking colors and copying them in any of 21 formats is free and unlimited, forever. So are Palette Studio, all 317 curated palettes, and the assistant. Dab Pro adds export poster and spec cards, pulling palettes from any image, iCloud sync across your Macs, and Smart Copy. It's a one time Lifetime purchase or a small monthly subscription.

Press Command G to open Palette Studio. The space bar generates a new set, clicking the padlock on a column keeps that color while the rest change, and you can pick a harmony method and a mood to steer it. From there you can open the tints and shades matrix, browse alternatives, adjust one color or the whole palette at once, and undo or redo freely. When you are happy, save it, export it as a palette or a gradient, or use Visualize to see it painted onto a sample interface. The contrast matrix shows every pair against WCAG and APCA, and there is a color vision preview alongside it.

Command E opens a library of 317 curated palettes that ship inside the app, so it works with no connection at all. Search by name, by tag, or paste a hex code to find the palettes built around that color. There are ten collections, four sorts, favorites, and a Saved scope for your own. With Dab Pro you can also drop in an image and Dab surfaces the palettes that match it.

No. Where Apple Intelligence is available and switched on, which means macOS 26 or later on supported hardware, you can describe what you want in plain language and Dab works out the tags and mood on your Mac. Everywhere else a keyword search takes over and the feature still works. Either way the palettes come from Dab's own library and generator, so it never invents a color, and nothing you type leaves your Mac. There is no cloud model, and Dab ships with no network access at all.

Twelve: English, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, and Russian. Dab follows your Mac's language by default, and you can override it any time in Settings, General or from the Language submenu when you right click the menu bar dot. Dab restarts to apply the change.

No, never. Dab uses Apple's built in NSColorSampler to read the single pixel you click, so it never records or captures your screen, and macOS never shows a screen recording prompt. Everything is local: no accounts, no analytics, no third parties, and Dab is fully sandboxed.

Everything lives locally on your Mac, in Dab's sandboxed container. There are no accounts and no Dab servers. If you turn on iCloud sync (a Pro feature), your color history mirrors through your own iCloud using Apple's Key Value Store, never a third party. See the Privacy Policy for the details.

Tap Restore Purchases on the Dab Pro screen to restore. To manage or cancel a subscription, open System Settings, then your name, then Subscriptions, or use the App Store app. Apple handles billing and refunds. As for the Mac itself: Dab runs on macOS 14 Sonoma and later, and the Liquid Glass surfaces light up on macOS 26 and newer, with graceful fallbacks below.