I’ve been working on Dwarf little by little and finally built one of the most requested features—unit types. The five available unit types are pixels, picas, centimeters, inches, and percent. Inches have dotted lines for quarter inches and percent always displays 100% on the ruler, but scales its grid to show ten columns and ten rows. At the moment, the units are based on a 72 dpi screen, but I’ll be adding an option to change the dpi, since most screens aren’t 72. If anyone has suggestions for that other than using a list, let me know.

The unit type is selected by clicking the menu at the right of the toolbar. It prompts a context menu with the options. Dwarf remembers which unit type you used last, so it’ll remain the same next time you startup. Along with unit types, I included positions and dimensions in the toolbar. This is mostly for the position, but I thought dimensions look nice up there too. At the moment, the position is in relation to the main screen, but the next build improves multi-screen support. You will be able to specify which screen to relate the position to. This also comes in handy for moving guides from screen to screen.

If you’re already a Dwarf user, start up for the update, or download it from GitHub. And, as always, let me know what you think in the comments.

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.

A recent AIR prerelease drop broke Dwarf. I’m actually not surprised, since it uses a pretty ghetto hack—displaying a transparent window fullscreen and using ‘virtual’ windows. Because Dwarf is such an integral part of my everyday workflow and it’s such a small app, I figured I could easily rewrite it within a day or two. I’ve been on such a code-sharing high, that I started a new Git repository for it where you can find my work in progress. So far, I have a single ruler working with a semi-functional Mac toolbar. Everything should be complete either tonight or tomorrow, so keep an eye out.

On a legal note, the source code is provided under the GNU General Public License (GPL), so you can reuse and modify the code all you want as long as it’s still free. If you’d like to use it for commercial purposes, let’s talk.