Using the HSL colour space on Android

Written by Ben Wendt

For my fun projects that include color, I like to use the following palette in the HSL space:

  • random hue
  • full saturation
  • 50% lightness

This is easy in HTML because HSL is in the CSS specification and it has great cross browser support.

It’s a tiny bit harder in an Android app.

Java on Android uses the rgb color space by default, but there are some handy methods for using HSL.

float[] colors = {(float)Math.random() * 360,255,127}; 
int rgb = Color.HSVToColor(colors); 
r = Color.red(rgb); 
g = Color.green(rgb); 
b = Color.blue(rgb);