PixelStick For Mac Manual

Measure Distance (Pixels), Angle (Degrees) and Color (RGB)
Anytime, Anywhere on the Mac

To search any page just use command f to find a word or phrase.

Originally by Ryan Leigland
2012-13 Updates by Mark Fleming
2014-20 Updates by Bernie Maier

Version Changes · Latest Download on Plum Amazing

Overview

PixelStick is a tool for measuring distances (in pixels), angles (in degrees) and colors (RGB) on the screen. Photoshop has distance, angle and color tools but they only work in Photoshop. PixelStick works in any app, between app, in the Apple Finder in addition it is lightweight, handy, fast and inexpensive. Excellent for designers, navigators, mapmakers, biologists, astronomers, cartographers, graphic designers or anyone who uses a microscope or telescope or wants to measure a distance on their screen in any window or application. PixelStick is a sophisticated ruler, protractor and eyedropper that works anywhere that you do on your Mac.

Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man illustrates the ratios of the dimensions of the human body; a human figure is often used to illustrate the scale of architectural or engineering drawings. It can also be captioned with this quote. “Man is the measure of all things” – Protagoras

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts advanced to the level of Science. – William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

Accurate measurement is essential in many fields, and all measurements are necessarily approximations.

PixelStick measures pixels and the distance between pixels. The relation between pixels and whatever you are measuring is scale. It is measurement by comparison. In this way PixelStick can measure distance between galaxies planets, countries, cities, people, molecules, atoms or various sub-atomic particles in a photo if the scale is known. It is the same as the use of scale in a map. In a map you can look at the bottom right and see the scale which might be 1 in/1 mile. On that map cities that are 5″ apart are 5 miles from one to the other. Custom scales are available are available in PixelStick and can be used by astronomers, microbiologists, etc.

“Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.” – Albert Einstein

PixelStick is a utility that allows easily measuring distances and angles on your screen, zooming in under the cursor to show colors and allows copying those colors in 7 formats (CSS, HTML and several RGB integer and hex variations) in any application, window and across the desktop. In addition it does scaling so if you know the scale of a document you can measure its contents. Out of the box its measurements will work with Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and Photoshop. Since there is no standardized scale for arbitrary documents on the Mac, for other documents you can create customized scaling options in PixelStick that it can use in its measurements.

“If it can’t be expressed in figures, it is not science. It is opinion.” – Robert Heinlein

Most of what PixelStick does is obvious. Drag the endpoints to change the distance or angle. Click the locks or hold down the shift key to constrain the distance or angles.

manual

How PixelStick behaves when you have more than one screen depends on your version of macOS/OS X. OS X Mavericks introduced a user preference to allow screens to have separate spaces. When this preference is set (it set on by default in OS X Yosemite), application windows cannot span multiple screens. Therefore, PixelStick can only measure on one screen at a time when this preference is set. You can switch which screen PixelStick is measuring on by dragging the midpoint (i.e. the square) between screens. You can also use the Reset Position menu item on the copy of the menu on screen you want to measure on; if the PixelStick menu is not visible on that screen you can just drag the palette to that screen.

“Measurment is defined as process of determining the value of unknown quantity by comparing it with some pre-defined standard.” – Rasika Katkar

When the screens have separate spaces preference is not set, or when PixelStick is running on older versions of macOS, PixelStick spans all available screens.

Requirements

PixelStick requires Mac OS X 10.7 or later. Older versions of PixelStick are available for older versions of Mac OS.

Permissions

2 permissions are required by PixelStick to use all features.

The ‘Eyedropper Tool‘ requires the permission called ‘Screen Recording‘. The app should ask for this but you can set it yourself. Click the link below to open the panel in 10.13 (Ventura) or higher:

Tap to open the Screen Recording panel in System Preferences

MacOS System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> Privacy -> Screen Recording.

In older versions of Mac it looks like this. Notice below the checkmark is on for PixelStick for ‘Screen Recording’ permission.

If this is not on the eyesdropper will see the desktop colors not the colors of the window you are in

More details about this tool are in the ‘Eyedropper‘ section.

The ‘Screen Elements Tool‘ requires the permission called ‘Accessibility‘.

The app should ask for this permission but you can set it yourself. Click the link below to open the panel in 10.13 (Ventura) or higher:

Tap to open the Accessibility panel in System Preferences

Or go to: MacOS System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> Privacy -> Accessibility. Give PixelStick permission to access macOS’s accessibility services. When you click on the icon the system will put up this dialog.

Tap the ‘Open System Preferences’ and it will open the System Preferences:Security&Privacy:Privacy:Accessibility settings and will add PixelStick to the list on the right.

Unlock that dialog (at bottom left where the lock icon is) and make sure to add a checkmark to the left of the PixelStick icon. Now PixelStick has permissions.

Once you have granted permission to use the accessibility services, the next time you click on the screen elements ruler icon various screen elements underneath the mouse cursor will be highlighted and PixelStick shows the dimensions of the highlighted element.

More details about this tool are below in the ‘Screen Elements‘ section.

Coordinate System

manual

PixelStick uses a coordinate system like the macOS coordinate system. X can be seen as width and y as height. This means that the origin (pixel 0,0) is at the lower left corner of the screen. However, macOS deals mainly in points, whereas PixelStick is all about pixels since pixels are easier to visualise when describing a document on a screen. A point has no width and resides between pixels. Note that on modern hardware and modern macOS versions, these pixels are not necessarily the physical pixels on a display, especially a Retina display. macOS has scaling options that take away the direct correspondence between hardware pixels and what it reports to apps (like PixelStick) as pixels.

Distance

PixelStick reports both pixel distance and pixel difference. When you see two numbers together in the user interface of PixelStick like this 230,114 it is (x, y) or (width, height).

manual

x starts at the bottom left of the screen.

The pixel distance includes the width of the PixelStick endpoints. This is so that the actual size of the item being measured is reported. The pixel difference merely subtracts the coordinates.

“Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.” – Galileo Galilei

In the illustration to the right, the height of the picture is 13 pixels, so the distance is reported as 13.00. Note that if the diamond endpoint is at a position of y = 1, then the circle endpoint is at a position of y = 13. Thus pixel difference is 13 – 1 = 12.

Angles

By default, PixelStick reports the angle between the baseline (usually the horizontal line but if you set a new baseline, this is the dotted line) and the line made by the endpoints with values increasing as you move the diamond endpoint anticlockwise. The angle values can be positive or negative depending on the position of the diamond endpoint relative to the circle endpoint.

If you turn on Map Mode PixelStick changes the way it reports angles to be like bearings on a map. It reports angles using only positive values from 0 to 360 degrees, increasing clockwise. The baseline still defaults to horizontal or whatever you set it to last time. To set the baseline as north / south, just shift+drag the diamond endpoint to be above the circle endpoint and set the baseline, which is now a vertical line.

PixelStick Palette

Preferences – open and close the PixelStick prefs.
Eyedropper – expands the palette to reveal the loupe and eyedropper tools. IMPORTANT: Eyedropper requires PixelStick to be added to the permissions. See Permissions above.
Help – opens this online manual.
Screenshot – Select a region to grab.

Screen elements – measure UI elements of running apps (needs Accessibility permission).

…

FAQ

…

Purchase

Please purchase PixelStick to remove all limitations and support its continuing evolution.

Plum Amazing Store