At my Photoshop seminars, I often zoom in on a portion of my screen so that people at the back of the room can read some of the fine detail in an image, palette, or icon. If you use a Mac and would like to temporarily zoom in on your screen, then do the following:
1) Choose System Preferences and then click on the Universal Access icon.
2) Click the large button labeled Turn On Zoom (that is unless it happens to be labeled Turn Off Zoom).
3) When you want to zoom in on a portion of your screen, position your mouse over the area and then hold both the Option and Command keys and then press + to zoom in. The more times you press that key combo, the more you’ll magnify your screen. When you’re all done hold the same two keys down and press – to zoom out.
I’m sure there is a utility available for Windows that has similar functionality, but as far as I know it’s not built into the operating system… if I’m wrong, please let me know where to find the feature.
Hey Ben, that’s a neat trick for the Mac. I don’t know of any zooming built into Windows either, but I use Zoom+
http://www.gipsysoft.com/zoomplus/
It’s free — open source, even — and great to use. It was created to help with GUI development. It can zoom from 2x to 32x, has a “follow the mouse” mode (or you can drag a box to a fixed part of the screen), has a color-eyedrop picker, supports transparency, allows you to update refresh rate, and NO I’m not affiliated with the developer 🙂
Great… I knew there would be something available for windows and I thought it would be free.
Thanks David.
Ben — Try this in XP.
Start->All Programs->Accessories->Accessibility->Magnifier. I’ve used this tool in presos for quite some time, rather than changing the font size in my demo app to “Gi-Huge-ic”. Works pretty well… If you don’t like it, the help lists a page on the msft web site that has links to other screen mag programs for Windows…