I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do.

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Sat, 02 May 2026 12:45:53 GMT

danmorgan@vmst.io — Sat, 02 May 2026 12:45:53 GMT

@stroughtonsmith I have one minor wrinkle. When I copy the hex code of a color from Pastel to an Adobe program I have to delete the octothorpe or Indesign/Illustrator/Photoshop doesn’t accept the color correctly. I think it always changes go black because it is assuming the code is without the #. This is an Adobe problem I realize, but could we have a pref to toggle so I can copy the next code without the leading octothorpe?

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Sat, 02 May 2026 11:07:27 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Sat, 02 May 2026 11:07:27 GMT

It's far too early to do any real data analysis on Pastel's switch to a subscription model, but I can say that for as much as people complain about subscriptions online, the actual numbers don't seem to back it up. Actual unit sales of Pastel are up 3X from when it was a non-subscription payment, and most of them are the yearly sub not the monthly option. It's fascinating to watch. Makes it so much easier to budget development time to go towards improving Pastel, too, so I've been updating it

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Sat, 18 Apr 2026 13:40:05 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 13:40:05 GMT

Working on a bunch of quality of life updates and bug fixes for Pastel this week, including a little bit of new UI, and some improved behavior

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Sat, 21 Mar 2026 12:15:37 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 12:15:37 GMT

(Broadcasts, in fact, is my third most-popular app by unit count. Fourth, if I include an app I sunset long ago. But it does make the most money, by far)

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Sat, 21 Mar 2026 12:12:12 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 12:12:12 GMT

53,000 devices have updated to the latest version of Pastel over the past day, and it has done 350K (unique) units over its lifetime (which is several multiples of Broadcasts). I've always been generous with the free tiers in my apps, but I think I might have massively overdone it with Pastel. If even 1% of Pastel's users paid for a subscription, that would be a salary unto itself and allow me do so much more with the app. Hard not to feel sheepish about how much I've left on the table

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Fri, 20 Mar 2026 23:33:32 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 23:33:32 GMT

Taking another crack at the 'Gallery' tab in Pastel, while I have the codebase open. The idea is to provide a vehicle to offer new/refreshed curated collections of palettes without stomping on the built-in presets. Also a way to recover deleted presets. I'm reasonably happy with the idea so far (though content and UI is still temporary). Ideally they would have illustrated key art of some kind, but in lieu of that I'll have to find some other way to visualize collections

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Thu, 19 Mar 2026 11:05:58 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 11:05:58 GMT

All of this is subject to change in the future, but I have no plans to do so. And this model, by and large, is what I will be doing with @broadcastsapp with Broadcasts 4.

There is so much I'd like to be able to do in both apps that requires investment, and the only way I can justify it is if the revenue line is going in the right direction, otherwise that time needs to go into new products. I would like to do both things! So Pastel gets to be my test case, and we'll see how it goes

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:55:06 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:55:06 GMT

I've tried to make Pastel's subscription pricing as unobtrusive as possible. As it stands:

• Existing paid users are grandfathered in and don't have to subscribe
• New users can subscribe for $2/mo or $10/year, with two-week free trials
• If you are on an OS version that I know won't be supported going forward (though I haven't decided to drop support yet), you won't see subscription options at all, only the legacy one-time purchase (now $20)

TL;DR, if you already own the app, you won't notice

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:42:04 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:42:04 GMT

Why subscriptions? A one-time purchase revenue graph, even for a moderately successful app, looks like this. Yet work required only increases in complexity — Pastel has had 40 multiplatform updates since it launched in 2020, including two system UI redesigns, and a whole new OS (visionOS).

One-time purchases just aren't sustainable, unless the product itself is also one-and-done — and that's just not possible on a moving target like Apple's OSes. Revenue can't be inversely proportional to time

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:29:09 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:29:09 GMT

Venturing out into the Great Unknown, I have finally made the switch from single-purchase to subscriptions in @pastelapp, for new customers, after talking about it for years.

I should have done it years ago, but the risk of the floor falling out from under me scared me off. Better late than never!

I'm much better prepared to handle the initial financial shock today, and as I've migrated everything to StoreKit 2 I've been really impressed by how easy Apple has made it to implement subscriptions

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:13:14 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:13:14 GMT

The next version of Pastel tackles a bunch of things, including revamped undo/redo support. I recently added pinch-zoom to the image importer, too. Paying attention to lots of little corners of the app that haven't seen love in a while — time for a polish pass now that Liquid Glass is no longer taking up all of my development time

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Thu, 29 Jan 2026 17:10:17 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 17:10:17 GMT

(Did I just spend the day reverse-engineering their proprietary color palette format? Yes.)

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Thu, 29 Jan 2026 17:08:11 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 17:08:11 GMT

The next minor version of @pastelapp will support exporting color palettes to Pixelmator Pro (on the Mac, at least, as they don't support that on iOS)

Update: now available!

Pastel App - App Store

Download Pastel by Steven Troughton-Smith on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips, and more apps like Pastel.

App Store (apps.apple.com)

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Wed, 17 Sep 2025 13:11:40 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 13:11:40 GMT

Giving Pastel a v2.4.1 today on macOS to update everything that looked blurry on a non-Retina display, as it's been a long time since I've given it a pass and some system metrics have changed lately that need round()ing. It's real hard to tell the difference from a JPEG, but here's a before/after

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Thu, 04 Sep 2025 23:47:17 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 23:47:17 GMT

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to how good iPadOS 26 looks on an external display. If you have an M1 iPad or higher, I implore you to give it a try

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Thu, 04 Sep 2025 08:12:22 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 08:12:22 GMT

I think @pastelapp for iOS and macOS 26 is now 'visually complete' ahead of the September event, which means I have to start thinking about marketing screenshots. I'm very happy with how this turned out, even if it took a while to get there

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Tue, 02 Sep 2025 11:39:24 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 11:39:24 GMT

Today's build of @pastelapp fixes the last of my major issues, and achieves all the goals I set out for this iOS 26 update All in all, the update touched about 6000 lines of code, with zero new features, just to adopt the new UI

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Mon, 01 Sep 2025 20:53:44 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 20:53:44 GMT

This *is* a nice API!

Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social)

Attached: 1 image Nobody ever told me UIContentUnavailableConfiguration was so cute! I should use it more

Mastodon (mastodon.social)

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Thu, 28 Aug 2025 08:14:40 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 08:14:40 GMT

I've started the TestFlight process for Pastel for iOS and macOS 26. There are some known issues on iOS, including a severe hang, but most things are in place now, and there are still slots available

TestFlight - Apple

Using TestFlight is a great way to help developers test beta versions of their apps.

(testflight.apple.com)

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Tue, 26 Aug 2025 18:54:53 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 18:54:53 GMT

With today's work out of the way, I think Pastel's iOS 26 update is done for Mac and for iPhone. The iPad build is blocked by my earlier radar, and I haven't figured out a mitigation strategy yet, but we're nearly there

Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social)

Attached: 1 image FB19905057 — Unrelated child UINavigationController overrides root split view controller's sidebar heirarchy and navigation bar on resize from regular to compact This one will prevent me from shipping Pastel on iOS 26 until I find a solution 🤷‍♂️ #radars

Mastodon (mastodon.social)

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Tue, 05 Aug 2025 22:45:37 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 22:45:37 GMT

Pastel on iPad is going to look effectively indistinguishable from the Mac version by the time I'm finished updating it for Liquid Glass

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Fri, 25 Jul 2025 07:54:13 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 07:54:13 GMT

Still a long way to go, but here's a before/after on Pastel on macOS 26 as of the current build.

During development, you spend so much time looking at the new design that you kinda forget how it used to look

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Thu, 10 Jul 2025 15:45:57 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 15:45:57 GMT

Slightly reorganizing my copy menu while I'm at it, and scratching my chin at the menu glass effect

Reply to I finally plugged GPT-3 into @pastelapp to generate color palettes from text prompts, and it just does exactly what I hoped it might do. on Thu, 10 Jul 2025 13:20:20 GMT

stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 13:20:20 GMT

Not making a whole lot of forward progress with my apps right now, so I'm gonna get some lateral progress done. Pastel still has about 5,500 lines of Objective-C code remaining that is all ripe for translating to Swift via Xcode's new ChatGPT feature. It'll give me a chance to sanity-check some of my legacy code in the process