When you select a color from the windows color picker for fill, line or text, the interface is the same as it probably has been since filemaker 4. Has anyone created a plugin with a better interface?

The picker is supplied by the operating system. There are different pickers that can be selected from, at least there are in FMP 10 and later.

That may be true on the Mac, but I'm having a hard time finding that option on Windows. If you could show how to change it, I would be grateful.

There are two interfaces -- the pallet interface and the color picker interface.

With the current color picker on windows you get three pallet choices:

88 colors standard for filemaker

256 colors standard for windows system

216 web-safe colors

This is the actual color picker used by FMPro on windows since the dawn of time:

• You cannot create custom pallets. You can't add a pallet - for instance the visibone or visibone2 pallets.
  
• There is no quick interface to switch pallets. You have to go to the edit --> preferences --> layout tab every time you want to switch.
  
• You cannot save the 'saved' colors between work sessions or from one fm solution to another, and you only get a temporary and limited number of custom colors.
  
• You end up having to copy and paste your preferred colors from a color pallet of your own creation or buying cut-and-paste solutions.
  
• The color picker interface is not resizeable
  
• Most problematic is that there is no way to grab a color from somewhere within a layout.
  

The mac color picker interface is more intuitive and can grab colors from the layout, generally has more options and is resizable.

I don't think the color picker on filemaker is specific to windows system -- it's just what fm decided to implement for windows. For instance, even office has changed their interface since filemaker 4 debuted. The office color picker is also resizable.

While we're at it, there is no support for vector gradients or images within drawn shapes. Even Powerpoint has a better interface for color, gradients and inserting images as backgrounds into shapes.

It's time for Filemaker's color picker interface for windows to grow up, eh?