Rulers: Measure Everything On Your Screen

Sometimes you just have to measure things on your Mac. If you’re a designer, you have to measure distances between objects. And if you do any kind of creative work, or page layouts, you also need measurements. You could eyeball it, or you could get a tool like xScope. But, if all you need are simple rulers, you will want to look at omnidea’s Rulers.

Rulers’ main feature is just putting rulers on your screen. It adds a horizontal ruler to the top of your screen, and a vertical ruler to the left side of your screen. Wherever your mouse is, there will be a red marker on each ruler to show the relative position of your mouse to the rulers (which is not the actual start of your screen). If you don’t want to see the rulers because you are using some of Rulers’ other tools, just go to the point where the two rulers meet and click on the [-]. Whenever you want them back, you just click on the [+] in that same corner. If you want the rulers to be on different sides of the screen, just go to Rulers>Preferences… and change the corner in which the rulers meet. You can change opacity and colors, too.

The only window you will see in Rulers is the inspector. This is where you can see where your mouse is (zoomed in, of course), the mouse’s coordinates, and the color of the pixel your mouse is over. There are two coordinates that it gives for your mouse: relative and absolute. Relative is the position from the rulers, and absolute is the position from the upper-left-hand corner of your screen. The color field shows you the color of the pixel that your mouse is currently over in Hex and RGB codes. The first time you open Rulers, this window will show all three of these fields. If you click the spiral in the upper-right-hand corner of the window, you can toggle between full, only image, and only coordinates and color.

The last feature I will tell you about is Auto Measuring. With this, you can put your mouse anywhere on your screen, and Rulers will tell you the amount of space between two elements. If you want to know the width of the sidebar of a Website, just put your mouse somewhere on that sidebar (where there is no text), and it will tell you. It gives you the distances across and up-and-down between things. As said above, text usually gets in the way of these measurements, so make sure there is text around when you do it.

omnidea’s Rulers retails for about $16, and you can pick up a trial from their site. It is almost essential to design and some programming work, so if you fit one of those descriptions, I highly suggest that you give it a try.

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