Measure Help

See also Tutorial, Examples, and Reference.

Overview

Measure is a combination calculator-with-units and reference database. You can do calculations using your own data, or using data from the database, or any combination. Once you have a result, you can get some perspective on the answer by comparing it against similar values in the database.

Measure automatically tracks units of measurement for you, and you can construct complex units of measurement from the ones provided:

2 days plus 1 hour is 49 hours
9.8 meters/second² times 1 minute is 588 meters/second
5 volts times 2 amps is 10 watts
1 foot plus 1 second does not compute

What's in the database?

The database contains 3,410 items, including:

200+ basic units of measurement (997 including metric prefix variations), in 65 categories ("kinds of units"),
countries and other places,
U.S. states, capitals of states, and some large cities of the world,
all known chemical elements, a few other substances,
planets, moons, and selected other astronomical items,
certain people (chosen, for example, because they are rich, infamous, run a company that is also in the database, or wrote Measure),
communication media, videotape formats, television standards,
sounds, colors, numerical constants,
vehicles, tall buildings, events, activities, snack foods, household items,
equations relating to geometry, algebra, physics, money, and time,
all the attributes that describe database items (they are themselves included in the database as items),
and lots of other things that seemed interesting for one reason or another.

Each item has various attributes, which can be numerical values, text, references to other items in the database, or links to the Web.

How to get started with Measure

You may want to work through the Tutorial and some Examples.

You can explore on your own, as well:

Try the various menu items.
Try clicking on values displayed in various kinds of windows. (When a window shows a number of rows with more than one column, it makes a big difference which column you double-click in.)
In addition to double-clicking, try the Get Info command with an item selected (Apple-I).
Enter values into the Stack window and then manipulate them using the buttons at the bottom, or using menu items.
Click the "completion pop-up" to the right of the input area to see what sorts of things Measure is expecting you to type next.
Try drag-and-drop. You can drag items from many different places, and you can drop things into a Stack window.

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