Free Ruler for Mac OS X

For those who need a free and focused ruler application I recommend Free Ruler. It not only gives you accurate measurements in pixels but if you click the measurements it switches between inches, picas and centimeters. You can easily drag the ruler around and make it semi transparent if you need to see what's beneath it. You can also easily group and ungroup the vertical and horizontal rulers. But that's not all.

Here comes the best part, at least for me that is. When you have your object measured, you can just copy the measurements and it places both sizes on the clipboard in this form: 80 pixels, 32 pixels. This is so easy to modify later for CSS code: {width:80px; height:32px}. Hopefully in the next revision of this great app there will be an option to format the clipboard code the way the user wants. Also, all features can controlled by keyboard shortcuts if you're a heavy user.

To convert measurements from pixels Free Ruler needs to know the Pixels Per Inch of your screen. You could do that manually and enter a custom value, but if you use an LCD screen the application makes it easy for you to do that caculation. You can just simply enter the monitor size and you're done. I just discovered that my screen is apparently has an 99.057ppi resolution. Based on my measurements it's almost precise (mine was 98.823ppi), but I wonder if the proportions of the screen doesn't affect this automatic calculation.

I really love this app. It's full featured and free. The only thing that I could pick on is the application icon that seems to be half the size compared to other typical icons. It sort of breaks the monotony of the icons in my Dock, which can be considered a good thing.

If you prefer to download a free Dashboard widget with limited functionality provided by Apple click here.

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