Thanks john- so far no luck reproducing it. But i was jumping back and forth between Layout and SU, Thea and photoshop so maybe this had something to do with it. Weirdly, the color palettes list is available is Layout as Jeff pointed out. So maybe something switched it on and the pref carried over to SU. (i dont really know what i am talking about here) IF i can reproduce will post the process.
thx again,
And

HI- Thanks all for your responses!

To add another complication, the appearance of the palette list view, briefly, on my laptop roughly corresponded to installing the latest Thea plugin. Could this have done it? I was so happy there was a way to view the materials with the name and small screenshot, it was a bit glitchy but it looked liked Drivens screen shot. Alas it was not to be, the "feature/bug" vanished. This does clarify that there's not some corruption in the mac picker.
There are several instances of the palette appearing in various guides on line, but as Dave said, it looks like folks just grabbed a generic picker screen shot rather than taking one from SU. I'm going to try to reproduce the list again on the macbook pro to prove i'm not crazy. Thanks for taking the time to look at this. And

Hi even in the SU support it shows the icon for the palettes list.
http://help.sketchup.com/en/article/96094
Through the palettes list, i was briefly able to display the list as you see in Driven's post.
SU support's response is that SU for mac only uses the brick. I suspect a conspiracy.

Hi- thanks for your response. This list is exactly what it looked like on my laptop, when i had the color palettes option, but it has vanished.
SU tech support got back to me and had me dump the prefs etc, without effect. Even ran a terminal script that should have reset the color menu. You do have the color palettes option and this is all i need. I'm a bit at a loss here but it looks like SU2014 should in fact have that icon on the color picker. It wasn't clear to me if SU had somehow removed it.

HI-
I'm colorblind and for some reason the color palettes icon is missing from my color picker. This is a huge problem for me as on the mac there is no way to display colors as a list. For a moment, when i used sketchup 2014 on my laptop it did display the color palettes icon. I could then change the view to list and display the colors with the name next to it. But this feature disappeared. I have looked for plugins that could display colors/materials as a list but so far have not found anything. Is this a bug with sketchup or Mac? I am running 10.9.2 See attached image for clarity. Would really appreciate any help!!
thanks
and