Magpie learns to measure and align

I kept reaching for a second app every time I needed to check whether two elements actually lined up, so Magpie 1.2 and 1.3 close that gap. There are two new tools, and both work over your whole desktop rather than just inside a capture.

Measure (⌥⇧M) puts a PixelSnap-style measuring tool on screen. Move the cursor and rays shoot out to the nearest detected edges with live pixel distances, or drag a loose box and it snaps tight around whatever is inside it. Click locks a measurement in place, ⇧-click keeps several up at once, C copies the value, and ⌥ flips between pixels and points. Edge-detection tolerance is tunable in settings if it's snapping too eagerly.

Guides (⌥⇧G) gives you persistent alignment guides across the entire desktop, xScope-style. Click places a horizontal or vertical guide, Space flips the orientation, and ⇧ snaps it to a detected edge. Drop two parallel guides and a badge reads the distance between them. They stay visible over every app, they're click-through so they never get in your way, and they don't appear in captures or screen sharing. That last part matters more than it sounds: you can leave guides up while you work.

The annotation editor gets a measure tool too. Sweep across an element and a dimension line snaps to the edges it crosses with a live px label, endpoint handles stretch it afterwards, and it renders into the exported image, so you can hand someone a screenshot with the spacing marked on it.

Also new: a What's New window that shows the changelog in a proper native window, and pops up once automatically after each update, so you're not left guessing what changed.

Measure and Guides are part of the licensed feature set, along with recording, scrolling capture, and Magpie Cloud. Magpie is still $9.99 one time for 3 Macs, with a 14-day full trial and screenshots free forever after that. Grab it from the Magpie page or with Homebrew: brew install --cask skulkworks/tap/magpie. Full details are in the changelog.