friends' color selection -- greater flexibility

[coriolinus]

Title
friends' color selection -- greater flexibility
Short, concise description of the idea
That users may select from colors other than the ones provided in the listbox on the edit friends page, and that the method of changing the colors associated with existing friends be made more clear.
Full description of the idea
On the edit friends page, I would like to see two features implemented, both dealing with the colors associated with your friends. The primary request is that you provide a 'other' option when selecting both foreground and background colors for one of your friends, and text fields into which one may enter hex codes directly, instead of relying on the default options. I estimate this would take less than 15 lines of code to implement. The secondary request is that you provide some means to change the colors already selected for a particular friend; it may be possible to do so by re-adding that friend with the new colors selected but I have not tried this. If this is in fact the proper solution, a note to that effect on the page would be nice. The reason I ask for these features is that the system supports them; the Win32 client did both for me fairly easily. However, I have recently switched to linux, whose client does not do these things, and all the friends who I've added since have colors which do not match.
An ordered list of benefits

Greater color selection flexibility for advanced users.

Greater clarity to users who wish to assign new colors to their existing friends.

An ordered list of problems/issues involved

Possible confusion if people type a hex value without selecting 'other' and do not get the color they expected.

An organized list, or a few short paragraphs detailing suggestions for implementation

The code would look something like the following:

if(foregroundColorSelectBox=='other') {
foregroundColorSelectBox=foregroundColorOtherField;
} else {
// foregroundColorSelectBox in every other case already returns the hex number of the color selected
}

You would also have to probably do some validation on the contents of foregroundColorOtherField, and of course repeat everything for the background color, but this is still a fairly trivial bit of code modification.

Perhaps, instead of relying on the 'other' text box, check if there is a valid hex code typed into the appropriate field and if so, use it instead of whatever's in the selection box. Leave the 'other' box in so that there's no confusion.

Need some error-checking if the user selects 'other' but doesn't enter a valid hex code.