Cool Tool – Awesome Screen “Rooler”
This is a great little app I started using today.
One of the things I’m always using is some kind of screen rooler. I spend a lot of time creating or screencasts and I hate recording my fullscreen. I would much rather record at 1024x768 and scale down if I need to target a smaller form factor.
The challenge with not recording your fullscreen is that you need to measure the make sure the windows that are going to open during your screencast actually fit into the recording window.
Rooler is a great helper app for me. It’s a utility for pixel-perfect analysis and measurement of graphics. Rooler was created for designers to aid common tasks such as redlining and analysis of layouts. Rooler uses the on-screen graphics and can be used for any graphics- from static images to HTML in your browser to the UI of a running application. Rooler was originally inspired by the excellent OSX-only application xScope.
Here’s what the toolbar looks like:
Here’s the different options you have to click on the toolbar:
Spacing - I really like the spacing feature:
You can easily find out the spacing between different items on a screen. Very handy.
Capture - Similar to SnagIt type functionality
Magnify – Similar the built in Win7 magnify feature or other tools like ZoomIt v3.03 by Mark Russinovich
Preferences – lets you edit the Pixel tolerance. Though I haven’t had much use for this feature
Rooler is a .NET application. It requires Windows XP or newer and the .NET Framework version 3.5 SP1. It’s a ClickOnce deployed app, so painless install.
You can Download Rooler here.
There are essentially 4 types of activities you can do with Rooler (Dimensions, Bounds, Inspect, and Snip). Here’s a great starter how-to for using Rooler.
Thanks for checking out this post!
| Cheers, |
Murray Gordon ISV Architect Evangelist Microsoft Corporation |