A color palette you can actually preview, plus Video to GIF in your browser

Tamara — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 12:18:02 +0000

Picking five colors is easy. Knowing whether they work together on a page, a report or a spreadsheet takes more effort.

That is the part I wanted to make easier with 1click.tools. It is a free browser toolbox with no account required. The two tools I would most like feedback on are the Color Picker & Palette Generator and Video to GIF.

From a HEX value to something you can judge

The palette tool starts with a seed color and generates related colors using familiar harmony rules: analogous, monochromatic, complementary, split complementary, triadic and square. You can lock colors you want to keep while regenerating the others.

The useful part is switching between three live previews:

Website: a sample storefront, with a CSS download containing palette variables and starter styles.
Document: a sample report, exported as a Word DOCX file.
Sheet: a sample workbook, exported as XLSX with editable values and formulas.

For example, start with #527563, choose an analogous palette with seven colors, and switch between the previews. A color that works as a button might feel very different across a budget table. The preview makes that difference visible before you copy the colors into another project.

The download label follows the selected preview: Download CSS, Download DOCX or Download XLSX. That small detail matters because these are different files, not three screenshots of the same palette.

Underneath, the palette uses HSL hue relationships and assigns colors to roles used by the preview. CSS exports include foreground colors for primary and accent buttons. That does not make an entire design accessible automatically. Text and background combinations still need checking in the final context, and Office applications can render exports differently from the browser preview.

Turning a short video into a GIF

Video to GIF lets you trim and crop a clip, set dimensions and frame rate, choose looping, then preview and download the result without a watermark.

A practical starting point for a small demo is a five-second clip at 320 × 180 pixels and 15 fps. That represents about 75 frames. Doubling the duration doubles the frame count; doubling both dimensions gives each frame four times as many pixels. Those settings affect the amount of work even before considering how the content compresses.

The conversion uses FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly, loaded when conversion starts. The filter chain applies cropping, frame rate and scaling, then generates and applies a GIF palette with dithering. GIF has limited colors and no audio, so exporting a large, long clip is usually a poor starting point.

Local processing has tradeoffs

Selected files are processed on your device rather than uploaded for conversion. The image converter and PDF tools follow the same approach.

The tradeoff is browser memory and device performance. Large videos can be slow or fail, particularly on phones. Files above 200 MB show a warning rather than a hard block, and even smaller files can exceed a device's limits. Cancellation terminates the conversion engine so you can try a smaller clip or different settings.

Local file processing also does not mean the whole website makes no network requests. Loading the site and its conversion engine requires resources, and website analytics and advertising have separate privacy choices.

You can try the tools at 1click.tools. There are also image conversion, PDF and QR code tools, but I am especially interested in whether the palette previews help you choose colors, and which GIF controls feel unnecessary or missing.

DEV Community: Tamara

A color palette you can actually preview, plus Video to GIF in your browser

From a HEX value to something you can judge

Turning a short video into a GIF

Local processing has tradeoffs