Intro to Dwarf
I’ve been working on Dwarf over the past few days and decided it’s time to give a little introduction on its key features. Be sure to view fullscreen with no scaling to see it at 100%. The prerelease of Dwarf available to download on GitHub and the source code is hosted there as well. I’ll be rolling out the official 1.0 build pretty soon—I just need to add a few more key features.
Wow, this is really fully-featured! I’d been looking for a good screen ruler to replace JRuler (Windows) and FreeRuler (Mac, but a PPC binary) and this seems to do both the jobs. I’ll be trying it out starting today! So far I have one bug, if you click the DW button on the toolbar you get a 404 at this page:
http://github.com/destroytoday/Dwarf
Thanks for your work!
Loving Dwarf SO MUCH! Since you asked for ideas, here’s a couple…
Constrained drag (so when I copy and past a few rulers, I can constrain-drag them down or over with the Shift key)
some kind of delete shortcut key other than cutting
a menu command that would make a little xml snippet of all of your rulers and guides (simple way to save out the specs, similar to what you currently do with clipboard text) and recreate a layout later
Oh yeah one more
how about a numeric indicator for the vert or horiz position of a guide during drags, pinned to the edge of the guide, that fades away when you’re done dragging, so that I could lay out a few guides a certain distance apart from each other – I know I could do that with a few rulers next to each other, but what the heck.
Ok, I’ll leave you alone now – thanks again.
@Jackson — I’m glad you like it
GitHub was having some issues earlier and returning 404 for some reason instead of the correct ‘down’ error code. Check again now and you’ll be able to check out the source code.
@Rob — I love the idea of constrained drag. It’s super easy to do since I do it with guides. You can delete tools by pressing command+W, like any other window. I’ll be sure to make it possible with the delete key. I do plan to add a button for exporting a set/layout of the tools. And guides will get coordinates.
Awesome job, Jonnie! This tool will definitely prove indispensable to many users in the future.
A few ideas:
1) Ability to save/load grid and guide sets
2) Global hotkey for showing/hiding (X,Y) coordinates for grids/guides
3) Global hotkey for adding grids/guides
4) Global hotkey for locking/unlocking all elements on screen
5) Hotkey for locking/unlocking individual items on screen
6) A way for setting the X or Y value of a guide using the keypad (similar to how you can enter width/height values on grids)
ideas 2-5 would also benefit from having buttons assigned to them on the toolbar.
Keep up the great work!
Ideas? heh. Just steal the good stuff from xScope and you’re golden.
snap function would be nice. nice tool!
cheers!
Very nice! I had been using a Dashboard widget to measure on screen items. This is soo much better. This is going to be one of those little tools that I will thank Jonnie for every time I use it.
Looking good.
About the eyedropper+screen capture tools, you should plug Dwarf to your ScreenCapture class!
@Quentin — I’m going to hold off on any screen capture functionality until AIR 2.0 is out of beta. Even then, it’d be Mac-only :/
Yes, I understand!
I myself tried to write a quick screen-capture app for Windows this morning, got to say it works pretty well (AIR 2b2 and NativeProcess)…
I think it’d be easy to have a cross-platform API for that, thoughts?
Anyone tried this on Linux?
@Quentin — Which executable did you use in Windows? I couldn’t find one when I wrote ScreenCapture…
I used CmdCapture, it has quite a basic API but works pretty well.
I also found ScreenKap but didn’t try it, looks like it’s almost the same thing.
One more – constrained resize with Shift Key – just needed to do it to maintain aspect ratio of a ruler
@Rob — It’s on my list
This is absolutely fantastic. Keep up the awesome work.
I’m not familiar with Air’s limitations, but would adding an angle adjustment feature to the guide be out of the question?
I had no knowledge of Dwarf before watching this intro video, and I’m already in love with it.
aww.. i was coding soemthing exactly like this (although not in AIR). oh well. i suppose you saved me some time
Nice work!
Wow, I’m not a Air-guy but this seems awesome. Gonna give it a try and tweet it