Free Ruler

Free Ruler is another great application that I use on a regular basis. Since I intern with Nathan Bunney at Inventaweb.net, which is a web design company, I often need to figure out the pixel dimension of an area. Free Ruler does just that. It is a really simple application and is very easy to use.

To use Free Ruler, first download it here (note that there are two versions, the Lion version and the pre-Lion version, so do make sure you grab the right one). When you open it, you can see that there are two rulers, a horizontal ruler and a vertical ruler. Just place your cursor between the two rulers and it will tell you the height and width of the area. You can change the units to inches, picas, or centimeters, none of which I find very useful. Free Ruler is very simple and doesn't do a whole lot, but the features that it does have are very good. I will walk you through a couple of its main features.

The first is an option in the Options menu called "Align Rulers at Mouse Location" (or just use the keyboard shortcut Command ⌘ + O). This allows you to place your cursor at the corner of an object and use this simple shortcut to move both rulers to my cursor.

Another cool feature is the ability to copy the current selection's height and width by using Edit > Copy Measurement or the keyboard shortcut Command ⌘ + C.

Free Ruler is a great tool especially for a web developer. I hope you've found this short review helpful. Now go try it out!