Red Stripe 2 and the all new Sim Daltonism 2

Last year I released Red Stripe, a tool to help people with a red-green color blindness tell apart certain colors. It got plenty of media attention, but my impression is that it wasn’t as good as it should has been. Adding stripes everywhere the red component is higher than the green one is nice in theory, but the reality is that it can easily become misleading for intermediary colors, such as yellow.

So I took a fresh look at it in the past two months and changed the approach. There’s still stripes on red, but no longer on yellows, and there is a new kind of dashed stripes on greens. The filter has also been reworked to better handle low light situations. And it’s available today with many more improvements on iOS.

Red Stripe 2 is a free update to all users who purchased version 1.

On a Mac far away, a long 10 years ago, I made a first version of Sim Daltonism. Since then, the color blindness simulator app hasn’t changed much. I maintained it so it continued to work, making an Intel version when Macs switched to Intel processors, making it available on the Mac App Store. But if you weren’t paying attention to the version history you probably couldn’t tell what the small changes were.

That was until today. There’s an all new Sim Daltonism rebuilt on top of the Red Stripe code base. It’s unbelievably faster than the previous version and it has a new “transparent” mode where you can see through the filter window and click through it to affect windows under it. (This new mode is the default now.) In follow-the-mouse mode, the filter window will also never show up inside itself and infinitely repeat like in earlier versions, a much welcome improvement.

Moving to this new code base also brings you Sim Daltonism for iOS. Now you can look at the world through eyes having different color blindnesses. You might just find the colors a bit more boring than usual. But you could also discover things that stands out more than usual because all the other colors are fade.

Even the icon is prettier and all new.

Sim Daltonism 2 is, as always, a free app. But now with version 2 it’s even more free than that: it’s open source. Feel free to peek at the code and make some improvements of your own.