PixelWindow

Based on Adobe Air, PixelWindow is a tiny application that facilitates an on-screen adjustable ruler, thus giving you the possibility to seamlessly measure distances and objects. It comes in handy for web designers, for example.

After installing Adobe Air (unless you already have it), setting up PixelWindow should be a breeze, since this task requires minimal attention.

The interface is based on a transparent window that acts like a horizontal and vertical ruler, which shows the current width and height right in the center. In order to change the size of the ruler, all you have to do is drag the horizontal and vertical edges with the mouse until you obtain the right dimension.

This operation can be fine-tuned using the Ctrl key and arrow keys to resize the ruler by 1 pixel, or the Ctrl and Shift keys in combination with the arrow keys to resize it by 5 pixels. From this point on, you simply need to move the ruler over the object you want to measure or between two objects to find out the distance between them, in pixels.

The frame can stay on top of other windows. Moreover, you can toggle fullscreen mode, create new frames (since multiple instances are allowed), set a frame to a preset size (800x600, 1024x768, 1280x800), copy the width or height to the Clipboard, as well as use the mouse scrollwheel to adjust the ruler's transparency.

We haven't come across any stability issues in our tests, thanks to the fact that the software program didn't freeze, crash or prompt error messages. It had minimal impact on PC performance, running on low CPU and RAM.

To sum it up, PixelWindow provides you with a simple means of measuring any areas or distances on the screen using a resizable ruler, and it can be easily handled by anyone.