In Bluebeam Revu the measure toolbar is a powerhouse for communicating numerical information about the contents of PDFs. In Bluebeam Mobile it does some key things well, but misses the mark for some pretty clear reasons.
Overall:
What Mobile does well: simplifies the properties of the measurement tools to critical aspects that are easy to navigate on a mobile device. For greater accuracy, while dragging the controls, you get a nice zoomed-in reticle to help place them. Displays measurement text in the same units as the page scale.
What Mobile does poorly: The little yellow circle for control points turns into a big yellow circle that detracts from the clarity the magnified viewport provides. I think the yellow circle should be either invisible or given some level of useful transparency while placing it. These tools seem designed for gross estimation, but for maximum user confidence, it would probably be important to include either a snapping feature, grid feature, or something of the like which would give greater accuracy when placing the extents of measurement markups. Text color is always line color. This creates areas where the text of the markup is unreadable as it overlaps with the lines of the markup. Line opacity helps with this issue, but a black line becomes gray, and may not be ideal in all circumstances, so changing text color or something along those lines would probably create a more refined markup tool, IMO
Length:
What Mobile does well: covered in overall comments
What Mobile does poorly: covered in overall comments
Area:
What Mobile does well: changing fill color and transparency is great. Very similar functionality there to what Revu provides. the option to just click control points or drag is nicely executed for the most part.
What Mobile does poorly: resizing the bounds of the area is no fun. Each control point moves independently, with no alternative in sight. So, if I want a slightly larger square? Nope, not really an option here. Start over, or pretend squares don't need 4 right angles anymore or that my guesses are as perfect as I hope they are. Being able to add control points in the editing mode would be nice too.
Polylength:
What Mobile does well: covered in overall comments
What Mobile does poorly: this is kind of like with the snapping and control point issues discussed earlier. It would be great to have some way to close a shape it is outlining, like a floor. Area does the tap or drag thing to make both rectangular and non-rectangular shapes. Something similar for polylength would be great for using it as a perimeter measurement tool.
Count:
What Mobile does well: for what I've thought to use it for so far, this seems like a great tool. Edit mode allows you to add or remove points and the properties shows the tallied count total, so it doesn't have to be seen on the pdf itself. anything more than that and I think we're talking Revu territory and not mobile friendliness. i like that you can drag the pdf and then continue placing count markers and if you try to delete the last one it will warn you of this just in case.
What Mobile does poorly: because it avoids text usage, it avoids nearly every issue that the other measurement tools have. this one is a keeper just the way it is, IMO.
Ok, so that about covers it for me. The measurement tool is more powerful and customizable in Revu, but I'm hopeful that a couple more features could be added to the Mobile version to make the tools more powerful and useful without making the UI or experience get too bloated. Currently, I don't really trust the measure tool for anything but counting because I have so little confidence in where I am placing the extents of the markups. I'd say that is the biggest issue I have here. Almost every issue I outlined boils down to lacking confidence in how well my markups reflect the intended measurements I want to take.
