Plum Amazing today announced the new PixelStick Pro for Mac, a complete modernization of its longtime graphical measurement application. Two phrases describe its central ideas: The Relative Ruler and The Creator of Legends.
The Relative Ruler and Creator of Legends
An ordinary ruler tells you how many inches or centimeters something is. PixelStick can be taught what a distance represents. Give it a known scale or legend, and PixelStick can use that relationship to measure everything else in the image.
A scale on a map can turn pixels into miles. A microscope legend can turn them into microns. An astronomical image can use arcseconds, light-years, or other appropriate units. Designers can measure pixels and interface elements. Engineers can measure photographs and technical drawings.
“If you know the scale, PixelStick can make the image measurable.”
A Ruler That Found Uses Its Creators Never Imagined
“The original PixelStick has been used by people in an extraordinary variety of professional, academic, and personal fields over the past 25 years,” said Julian Miller, CEO of Plum Amazing. “Many people originally bought it as a graphics utility. We gradually discovered that some were using its relative measurement capabilities for many things we had never imagined.”
One of those users is Phil, a retired electrical engineer and integrated-circuit designer, who used PixelStick professionally to help analyze competitors’ semiconductor designs.
“When I was working, I used PixelStick a lot for reverse engineering competitors’ products,” Phil said. After obtaining high-quality images of exposed integrated-circuit dies, engineers could examine and measure structures within the chips.
Before PixelStick had its new Calibration Card, Phil found structures on the chips whose dimensions were already known and used them as his reference scale. Once PixelStick knew that relationship, he could measure other structures in the image.
Today, Phil uses PixelStick for something considerably larger: astrophotography.
“I have a multitude of telescopes and cameras,” he said. Different combinations produce dramatically different fields of view, and PixelStick helps him examine and compare the image scale, including arcseconds per pixel.
“The new addition of your calibrator is quite awesome,” Phil said. “Your application is unique and I enjoy using it quite a bit with my photography.”
That journey, from measuring structures in microns on integrated circuits to analyzing images of the night sky, captures the idea behind PixelStick’s Relative Ruler.
The Legend Is the Ruler
PixelStick Pro introduces a Calibration Card and Scan Legend feature designed around a simple principle of measurement: if one distance is known, other distances can be determined relative to it.
Drag PixelStick across a known scale, tell it what that distance represents, and save the calibration. Measurements can then be displayed in microns, millimeters, inches, miles, astronomical units, or virtually any unit the user needs.
Scan Legend can capture a small region along the ruler and use Apple’s Vision OCR to read common labels such as “1 mi” or “50 micrometers.” On Macs with Apple Intelligence and macOS 26 or later, an on-device model may parse more complex legends such as “1 inch = 2 miles.” Users review the detected value and unit before saving the calibration.
Unlike measurement tools built into graphics applications, PixelStick floats over the Mac desktop and works across applications, windows, and the Finder.
That combination opens several distinct uses. Designers and developers can inspect spacing, alignment, dimensions, and color. Cartographers, navigators, and meteorologists can measure on maps, charts, and weather imagery when a scale is known. Microscopists and biologists can work from labeled micrographs. Astronomers can calibrate against an image scale and measure in astronomical units, parsecs, kiloparsecs, or light-years. Engineers can measure annotated technical images without moving them into a separate application. This range is why Plum Amazing calls PixelStick the Relative Ruler.
Longtime users have found their own uses. One graphic designer described PixelStick as an essential tool whose on-screen ruler and color picker save time on every job. Another user wrote simply:
“Saves hours over the course of a web project. I don’t know what I’d do without it!”
Another described PixelStick as an “instant Swiss army knife on the screen.”
Rebuilt for Today’s Mac
PixelStick Pro is a new application, completely rewritten in Swift and SwiftUI for modern macOS.
PixelStick Pro measures angles and colors, provides straight and circle guides, includes an eyedropper and magnifier, captures screen regions, and supports saved calibration profiles. Map Mode reports angles like navigational bearings: positive values from 0 to 360 degrees increasing clockwise. The ruler overlay is click-through in empty areas, so users can keep working in Finder or another app underneath it.
Other new capabilities include live magnification, color history, named palettes, WCAG contrast checking, Snap Frame screenshots, Shortcuts and App Intents, and fine pixel-level positioning.
PixelStick works anywhere on screen rather than being confined to a particular graphics, scientific, or photographic application. It is used by people in academic fields, in business, and at home.
Shareware: Try It Before You Buy It
“We’ve been selling shareware for more than 30 years,” said Miller. “People sometimes forget what shareware really means: try before you buy.”
“We believe people should be able to use software and find out whether it has real value in their life, business, or profession before paying for it. PixelStick Pro includes every feature free for 15 days, with no credit card required. Measure something. Try it on your own work. Then decide.”
After the trial period, PixelStick’s basic ruler and guides continue to work.
PixelStick Pro is available now for macOS 15 and later. A lifetime license is $24.99; monthly and yearly subscriptions are also available. Owners of the original PixelStick are eligible for an upgrade discount.
PixelStick Pro
The Relative Ruler
If you know the scale, measure from microns to light-years and beyond.
About Plum Amazing
Plum Amazing, LLC is a US-based software company creating productivity and photographic software for desktop and mobile platforms. The company has operated as Plum Amazing since 2007 and previously as Script Software, dating to 1995. Its products include PixelStick, CopyPaste, yKey, iClock, iWatermark, and other utilities designed to help people accomplish practical work with their devices.