Once you're established and you're tuning the last 0.3% of the market that you might catch if only you used the 'right' colors you can spend time on this.
It's another nice example of premature optimization.
As an extreme worst-case scenario, consider post-war high-density architecture. With a few exceptions, they are various degrees of slum today, not because they lacked functionality (that came later when they were left to deteriorate), because anyone with the resources to left.
Back to software, I have had the pleasure of replacing a good number of ugly but functional line-of-business systems, and the eagerness with which users will adopt the new thing, almost entirely because it's pretty (it often doesn't much new for many users, the main improvements are on the backend and for power users), always catches me a bit off guard.
On the personal level, I've found that investing a bit of time up front in making a new thing pretty increases my personal level of happiness working on the thing, even if I end up changing entirely away from the original look as features evolve.
I'm firmly believe if it doesn't work it doesn't matter how good it looks and if it works but looks bad that's better than the reverse.
Then once you've figured out what to build you can always make it look pretty.
> Then once you've figured out what to build you can always make it look pretty.
That's a lot harder than it sounds. No, of course you don't commission a big fancy design before you know what the thing should do, but you equally can't just build an ugly, but functional thing and throw lipstick on it five minutes before shipping (or after - activities schedules for when the thing is 'done' have a nasty tendency to not happen). Both, in parallel, at its time, not either-or.
Terminal/DOS-based software isn't ugly, it's just a different interface (GUI vs. non-GUI).
Of course some technical people that know what they're doing will enjoy using the command line because you don't have a GUI that gets in the way, but using this fact to "prove" that people like ugly software better doesn't make sense—it's just a bad example.
Happiness comes from visual variety.
I have learned to give a shit about color choices.
*That's the literal 'literally', not the figurative one.
You still don't want to be spending more than a moment on that in early design, but with a tool like this covering the issue might only take that moment so you don't have to make alterations later when early design decisions/accidents are baked in and harder to change.
It's perception.
If you have an ugly bottle it doesn't matter if your wine is good, because most people won't get to try it.
This is (one of?) the cheapest wine in Italy: http://www.horecare.it/imagesvinobrik/full013.jpg
This is a really good Italian wine: http://www.terredifirenze.it/sites/default/files/bottiglia%2...
Try to be serious. Wine that costs 1000's of $ per bottle is in exactly the same bottle as wine that costs next to nothing. The only difference is the label.
Of course there are marketing whizzes that package crap wine in fancy bottles to sell it at inflated rates but that's nothing to do with what I was trying to illustrate.
Winebottle: glass enclosure usually topped off with a cork, usually made of green glass. That there is wine that is so cheap it isn't even sold in bottles is an optimization, the fact that there are very fancy bottles with wine that usually isn't all that good is marketing.
You're implying that if one uses the color tool, he's going to spend hours playing with it and forget about implementing important features. The tool will save you time instead of waste it, since you don't have to make up a color combination yourself, giving you more time for implementing stuff.
I also disagree than making an app look good will make it more appealing to only 0.3% of users. People are very design-oriented nowadays, and non-technical people will judge the quality and reliability of an app mostly by the way it looks. Personally, I _always_ try the better-looking app first, and if it works I stick with it and never even try the ugly one.