JQuery :: Taming The Farbtastic Color-picker Space - Clicking The Trigger Makes The Page Text Fade

The Farbtastic color picker is an elegant solution to the color-picking problem, but its usefulness is prohibitive in those situations where there is not enough screen real-estate. Because it is large, these are many. Since I want to use it in such a situation, I started working towards a solution.

The designed solution involved in clicking on something small, such as Click to Activate, and having the rest of the page become faded-out, while the color-picker appears superimposed over other parts of the page.

That solution is implemented up to a point. In the code posted:

- The trigger appears as part of the original DOM.,
- Clicking the trigger makes the page text fade, the color-picker appear, and the trigger changes to something like Click to Deactivate,
- Upon clicking, it does disappear, and the page text resumes it original appearance..

After this point, one might work towards making it more modular and more easily usable as is farbtastic itself.

It requires a var to hold state, and other things. Ideally, it could be combined with the original to offer a wider range of usage patterns. I have no doubt that the code can vastly be improved, since I am relatively new to jquery, although not to computing.

The code is posted below, in the hope that it proves useful to others, The only change made to the farbtastic.js code itself is to add "id='fbc' " to the outermost <div which is added internally. This change is not shown because it would involve posting all of farbtastic.js for this one change. The section of text used to illustrate presumed page content is from the NSIS Users Manual, and has no significance beyond being some text. The div named 'overlay' was employed to allow shifting the whole thing around as a unit relative to the trigger but might be eliminated were that not needed, since everything else works without it, Note also that the input#color from the original farbtastic has been replaced by 'repeater' which is a <div, but seems to work ok to get the color info.