Measure Schmeasure

Measure Schmeasure is a desktop ruler that gives you the possibility to measure the distance between any two objects on the screen, in pixels. It can be resized, flipped horizontally or vertically, and made to stay on top of other windows.

The setup operation is fast and uneventful. Worth mentioning is that .NET Framework must be installed on the computer in order for the app to run.

It shows a horizontal frame which resembles a ruler, thanks to its color and measurement ticks. This frame can be resized by dragging the right margin of the ruler; the number of pixels is calculated on the spot.

Although it's also possible to resize the ruler by dragging it from the bottom margin to make it wider, the application doesn't calculate its size to be able to view the vertical and horizontal dimensions at the same time. If you want it to do this, you must make the ruler vertical by opening the right-click menu.

We've noticed that the pixels retain the position of the horizontal frame when it's vertically flipped, forcing you to tilt your head to the right to read the measurement. This issue can be fixed by displaying tooltips, though.

As far as customization options are concerned, you can disable Measure Schmeasure from remembering the location, size and right-click options between sessions, change the text, background and resize highlight color, as well as tweak the ruler's opacity level. If you change your mind, you can reset all options to default with one click.

Unsurprisingly for such a tiny tool, it left a small footprint on system performance in our tests. It worked smoothly, without hanging, crashing or prompting error dialigs. On the other hand, its features need a bit more polishing to make Measure Schmeasure more convenient. Other than that, it offers a simple solution for measuring distances and objects in pixels.