Leopard Counts Pixels
By now you’ve seen all the amazing cool little updates that Apple’s OS X Leopard brings to the table for all of us Apple users. And, if you’re smart, you’ve updated already. Seriously, Leopard bring so much to the table it would be a crime to not upgrade.
One feature I have not seen mentioned anywhere that I just noticed is a small but useful little tweak done to OS X’s little screenshot utility. There are 2 ways of accessing this — if you’re a keyboard shortcuts kinda guy such as myself, you can simply press CMD-SHIFT-4 to give yourself a selection cursor for selecting a portion of the screen you would like to take a screenshot. Simply select a target and Boom, a PNG is created and placed on your desktop.
That feature is not new.
What is new however is a nifty little addition to that selection cursor — a readout of current screen pixel location via X / Y coordinates (I’d show the evidence of this but, for obvious reasons, I wasn’t able to secure a screenshot.). Now I can easily see that the os x menu-bar has a height of 21 pixels. Pretty neat. One potential downside is that OS X considers the top-left-most pixel to be 0,0 rather than 1,1.
If you aren’t a keyboard shortcut kinda guy you can also get this with the application Grab which is located in your ~/Applications/Utilities folder, though (oddly) this gives a slightly different cursor which includes a yellow tooltip-ish background behind the pixel count.
Additionally, CMD-SHIFT-3 does a fullscreen screen capture.
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