I saw Jeff's post about his updated ruler this weekend.  It's a nice tool.  I immediately started using it to measure some screen comps over the weekend.  Moving it around the screen and seeing the images below it made me think, "It would be nice to crop these out while I'm measuring them".  

I took some of his UI code, made a few changes and tweaks, added the screen capture code, and Cropper was born.  The UI tells you the width and height of the area you will be capturing.  It will capture whatever is under it.  All the captures are numbered and placed in a folder named Cropper on the desktop.  You can capture images in either BMP or JPG format. 

I also added a Record function that came about as I was testing the code.  I wanted to see if there were any leaks so I set it up to automatically take screen shots.  I placed the UI over a Quicktime trailer for Farscape and ended up capturing about 14 fps on my system.  That was about 2,000 screenshots taken and saved to disk in less than 2 minutes with no real memory usage increase.

As I was preparing to write this I grabbed the url to Jeff's post. I saw that he had updated Ruler once again, adding pixel nudging.  I had added the same functionality to my UI version, although a little different. 

  • Arrow Keys: Nudge one pixel.
  • Alt + Arrow Keys: Resize one pixel.
  • +Ctrl changes above to ten pixels.
  • [ or ] resizes but keeps the UI centered.
  • Double Click or Enter to take screen shot.

.jpg" align=baseline border=0>

Cropper has already come in pretty handy this weekend for cropping thumbnails out of the screen comps.  I just set the size to what I needed and moved it around, double-clicking on the areas I wanted.  All this in a 52 KB application.

There is also a notify icon with the context menu and a Reset option in the event you loose the UI or resize it too small to see. 

Latest news and download

Let me know what you think.