Hey, all. Recently wrote a project that stores a few NSColor objects in the UserDefaults. I still haven’t really figured out NSCoding and NSArchiver and all that, so I just wrote a quick hack of a function which takes a colour, converts it to RGB space if necessary, and returns an NSDictionary with keys Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha. Here goes:

NSDictionary *BCDictionaryFromColour(NSColor *colour) { NSMutableDictionary *dict = [NSMutableDictionary dictionary]; if([colour colorSpaceName] == NSCalibratedRGBColorSpace) { [dict setObject:[NSNumber numberWithFloat:[colour redComponent]] forKey:@”Red”]; [dict setObject:[NSNumber numberWithFloat:[colour greenComponent]] forKey:@”Green”]; [dict setObject:[NSNumber numberWithFloat:[colour blueComponent]] forKey:@”Blue”]; [dict setObject:[NSNumber numberWithFloat:[colour alphaComponent]] forKey:@”Alpha”]; } else { return BCDictionaryFromColour([colour colorUsingColorSpaceName:NSCalibratedRGBColorSpace]); } return dict; }

And then of course there’s the vastly simpler partner function which takes such a dictionary and makes a colour out of it:

NSColor *BCColourFromDictionary(NSDictionary *dict) { return [NSColor colorWithCalibratedRed:dict objectForKey:@”Red”] floatValue] green:[[dict objectForKey:@”Green”] floatValue] blue:[[dict objectForKey:@”Blue”] floatValue] alpha:[[dict objectForKey:@”Alpha”] floatValue; }