Scale Model Helper - a utility for color matching

[Guest]

Hi folks, I've been working on a free (no ads) application for Android mobile devices (requires android 4.0) for a bit now, which is intended for scale model builders and miniature painters.

You can download Scale Model Helper for Android at the link.

I also have an online version of it, as well as a blog where I will be posting further updates.

Right now I have FS, RAL, RLM, Humbrol, Revell, Tamiya colors in it, but I will add as many color brands as possible. I'm also planning to add a color inventory features and other stuff.

Anyway, check it out, and let me know what you think.

[Guest]

Just released version 1.4 of Scale Model Helper. It contains the following changes:

- Testors / Model Master colors (not including Floquil and Pactra which are about to be discontinued)

- ANA – American Army-Navy Aeronautical color standard

- Added some basic terms and definitions for colors

- Color filter will now search on each search term separately. For example, previously a search for “red blue” would not have found any results. Now it will return results for either the word “red” or “blue”

- Any search on the word “gray” will also search automatically on the word “grey” and vice versa.

- Any color with no specific rgb value will now have a background color of the general row color. For example, previously a color that didn’t had any other matches would have a blank background color, and the color would show in the RGB column. Now it will have a background color.

I've also setup a poll on the website for what colors you want to see in the next update.

If you don't see the color that you want on the poll, let me know and I'll add it.

[Guest]

Very useful indeed. Much easier to use than the Ultimate whatsit. I have saved the online version. Thank you for this.

[Guest]

Thanks! I Assume you mean the chart at http://www.paint4models.com ? Yeah, that was one of my incentives to start this application, it's missing quite a few colors from what I've seen while collecting them.

[Guest]

Will you make one for iPhone in the future?

[Guest]

I probably will, but I can't promise anything, there's a license cost for both the mac development and the Xamarin framework I'm using... but it's in the future, possibly after I'll add some more content and features to it.

[flyjoe180]

I only have Android 2.3.3 on my phone. But I have bookmarked your online chart, it looks very useful and easy to use.

[Andy2035]

I just put this on my tablet (Android 4.1.1) and it does what it says on the box, works great, thank you...

[Guest]

Glad to hear that I wanted to support Android 2.2+ , but Android 4.0 had very useful features for development.

[Guest]

Version 1.5 is now available:

- New color brands: Citadel / Games Workshop

- New color standard: British Standard - a set of standards used in Britain for construction and engineering, including colors (British Standards - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). I've included BS381C, BS5252, BS2600 and BS4800

- Search improvements: I've switched to an OR mode from the previous mode, which was a simple text search without separating the search terms, because I've seen people doing searches on multiple words, but because they weren't exactly the same as the color name, they didn't find what they were looking for. However, this caused a bigger problem, in that later searches would bring back a lot more results than what people actually wanted to search for.

I did some changes to the grid and searches are now happening on the server side. This enables me to share the search code between the online version and the Android application, and being able to do better searches.

Search will now be an AND mode between each term, so searching for "blue angel" will find all the colors that have both "blue" and "angel" in them, for example Testors 2023 "Blue Angels Yellow".

Also, you can search on exact text by wrapping the search term in double quotes, and you can search only specific color brands by prefixing the color brand name and a colon to the search term, for example, fs:blue will search for anything containing the word blue in only the FS color brand, and fs:"blue" will search for exactly the word blue in the FS color brand.

See the Advanced Help button in the applications for more details and examples.

- Search will no longer search in the RGB values to prevent false positives when searching for color numbers.

I've also reset the poll for the color brands in the next version, so vote for your favorite color brand. Reaper so far is in the lead. Let me know if there are other color brands that you want to see.

[flyjoe180]

I've been using your page and it's easy to use once you get the hang of the menus. Nice work, the changes for the search are helpful.

[Guest]

I've been using your page and it's easy to use once you get the hang of the menus. Nice work, the changes for the search are helpful.

Thanks, glad you like it!

[Guest]

It's a somewhat small update, but I wanted to finish it before getting to the new features I've been planning.

Here are the changes:

- Added Reaper colors

- Added Gunze colors

- Fixed bug when searching for some colors with the word grey, for example "ulthuan grey"

- Due to seeing people trying to search for specific brands but not adding colon, which would have returned zero results, I've added an option to search for specific colors with numbers without the colon. For example, instead of searching for "h:86" , you can write "h86" and get the same results. This will only work for searching for specific color numbers, otherwise you still need to separate the color brand and search term with ":" as explained in the Advanced Search section.

- Improved search speed

For the next version I'm planning a color inventory feature, as well as some more interactive features (flagging a color match and similar). I want people to be able to have access to their color inventory from either the online or the android versions, so I'll be doing an optional login of some sort, probably based on either facebook, google+, or just an email and password option, and the actual color inventory will be hosted on my server.

I'm also having some ideas about actual physical tools but I'm keeping it under wraps for the moment, I need to see how well it'll actually work out.

Scale Model Helper is a utility to make it easier for the scale model builder and miniature painter to match colors from different brands. There is an online version and an Android version.

[Guest]

Well, it's been 8 months since the last time I've released an update to Scale Model Helper, which is a lot longer than what I've been planning. I was having problems creating what I wanted with the application, and work was busy, so I didn't had much free time left. I did however managed to solve the technical problems, and I have more free time, so hopefully the next updates won't take as long.

Since it's been so long, here's a quick reminder of what is Scale Model Helper. Scale Model Helper is intended to help the scale model builders and miniature painters in their every needs, from color selection and matching, to scale model building to-do and shopping lists, whether you’re building armor, aircraft, ships, cars or trains. There is an online version at online version and an Android version.

Here are the changes in this version:

- Added P3 colors

- I've added support for marking colors in your inventory. It's very basic right now (you can see an example of how it works here, but will serve as a base for other online and shared content features that I'm planning. I'm using facebook as the identification mechanism as I didn't want to deal with usernames and passwords for now. An important feature is that this inventory is shared across both the online and the Android version if you login to facebook on each application.

- I've started a UserVoice site for Scale Model Helper. UserVoice is a site that lets me get feedback from people with bug reports and more importantly, ideas and features that they're interested in seeing in the next version, so I can have a better idea of what to work on next. The main portal for it is here, give it a look, browse around, and vote / post about ideas and features you'd like to see next.

[Guest]

I've booked marked it and will use it when I next need some colours. I should also save me buying colours I already have, but in different makes