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Check out Rooler – A free Screen Measurement Utility!

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Fellow Blender, Pete Blois, has written a small application called Rooler that allows you to make measurements of everything visible on your screen. You can download it by clicking here.

Rooler helps solve a common problem you have when designing UIs. That common problem is figuring out how large something is or how much space exists between elements. To help with this, you have this nifty tool called Rooler which, to think about it differently, is like having a virtual ruler that you can use to measure things on your screen.

Rooler is a small application that soars above all of your windows and provides you with some common screen measurement tools:

dragToolbar

For example, let’s say that I need to create a graphic whose width is the exact size as some text I have:

BlueText

The above text is actually an image. Right clicking on the image and seeing its properties will give me the width of the image, but it may not translate to the actual width of the content stored inside it. Finding the size of the actual content is where a tool like Rooler comes in handy.

You can click on the Bounds icon to draw an overlay rectangle over the area you want to measure:

blueText_2

Once you have drawn the boundary, release the mouse cursor and Rooler will automatically create the smallest box that bounds all of your data:

finalSize

Best of all, you all get the width and height of this bounding box as well, and you were able to do this without using another image editing tool and performing various (albeit simple) steps needed to get a similar value as what you see above.

I just showed you one example of what can be done, but you can do a bit more as well. Go check out Pete’s Rooler page for more examples and information on other things this tool does.

Cheers!
Kirupa :)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 26, 2009
    PingBack from http://www.anith.com/?p=41666

  • Anonymous
    May 26, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 26, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 26, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2009
    Dear Mr. Blois Thank You! for making Rooler, It is just what I have been looking for. Before I download the software, will it work on Microsoft Windows Vista 64bit Thank's Jeannette

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2009
    Hi Jeannette - While I am not Pete, to answer your question, it will work in 64-bit Vista. Cheers! Kirupa :-)

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2009
    Don't forget that the IE Dev Toolbar has a Ruler, a Color Finder, and a Browser Resizer in the Tools menu.

  • Anonymous
    July 02, 2009
    This blog suffers from what's known as "float drop". It's better to use tables for a page layout than to create a less functional page.