Has Apple ever publicly spoken about OS X's zoom feature?

[iEugene]

Sorry if this topic has been done many times, I couldn't seem to find one on it.

A few weeks back my friend showed me the zoom feature that OS X has and I've been looking around Apple's website and fan sites, and don't seem to find much on it. Have they ever advertised it? I barely hear anyone talk about it, as well as me showing a bunch of long time Mac users who never heard about it.

(for those who don't know what I'm talking about, if you have a scrolling mouse, hold control and scroll with your mouse up and down).

Sorry if the topic seems petty, just a quick question.

 

[Scarlet Fever]

i got something else cool for you as well

press ctrl+option++8

 

[iEugene]

i got something else cool for you as well

press ctrl+option++8

Yeah I saw that one on the guides, thanks though.

 

[Benjamin]

I believe they do advertise and they do it via Universal Access.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/universalaccess/

 

[iEugene]

I believe they do advertise and they do it via Universal Access.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/universalaccess/

Heh, my bad, thanks for the link!

 

[balamw]

A coworker and I were discussing a document earlier today and he went to try and zoom in only to realize. Oops! I'm not at home on my Mac and Windows doesn't zoom.

B

 

[Kernow]

A coworker and I were discussing a document earlier today and he went to try and zoom in only to realize. Oops! I'm not at home on my Mac and Windows doesn't zoom.

B

Windows does zoom - on my laptop at work, if I go Start>Programs>Accessories>Magnifier, the top part of the screen is zoomed in section, which follows the pointer around in the non-zoomed bottom half of the screen.

 

[dbhays]

it works on my laptop with control+ two finger scroll. Pretty nifty!

 

[aussieNickuss]

Start>Programs>Accessories>Magnifier

Thats it....you have to go to Start>Programs>Accessories>Magnifier instead of just Ctrl>Scroll.

And then it only appears in a narrow panel at the top or bottom of your screen. I've shown an "oldie" the zoom on windows...they didn't end up using it 'coz it was too hard.....unlike Macs version.

 

[dllavaneras]

Apart from Universal Access, I don't think so. Maybe in the OS 10.0 release keynote?

 

[akadmon]

A coworker and I were discussing a document earlier today and he went to try and zoom in only to realize. Oops! I'm not at home on my Mac and Windows doesn't zoom.

B

That is so not true. You can zoom in (and out, btw) in any MS Office app (as well as in IE) with CTRL+wheel scroll. And unlike in OSX, fonts are scaled such that they don't lose their sharpness. In OS X zooming in looks like zooming in on a low res jpg. Yuck!

 

[Eraserhead]

That is so not true. You can zoom in (and out, btw) in any MS Office app (as well as in IE) with CTRL+wheel scroll. And unlike in OSX, fonts are scaled such that they don't lose their sharpness. In OS X zooming in looks like zooming in on a low res jpg. Yuck!

Resolution independence should fix that.

 

[Eric5h5]

Resolution independence should fix that.

Nope, unless they completely rewrite the zooming routines. Right now zooming just enlarges the bitmap of the screen. On the other hand, it works with everything, not just a few apps.

--Eric

 

[aristobrat]

Based on how my friends that work at the Norfolk Apple store talk, someone's publicly talking about this feature because they sell 1 or 2 systems systems a week to vision-impaired "switchers" who already know about the feature.

I think that's cool.

 

[BigPrince]

Some of the presenters(Apple ones included) used this "trick" during there presentations at Macworld.

 

[mkrishnan]

Nope, unless they completely rewrite the zooming routines. Right now zooming just enlarges the bitmap of the screen. On the other hand, it works with everything, not just a few apps.

I could've sworn this feature used to be in Office on Macs as well. It is on a number of other Mac apps, including Firefox (hold ctrl-option and scroll).

 

[jmsait19]

Resolution independence should fix that.

my thoughts exactly... this may be able to become an extremely useful feature with resolution independence.

 

[applelabs]

That is so not true. You can zoom in (and out, btw) in any MS Office app (as well as in IE) with CTRL+wheel scroll. And unlike in OSX, fonts are scaled such that they don't lose their sharpness. In OS X zooming in looks like zooming in on a low res jpg. Yuck!

I'm not sure if this what you're talking about... Go to "System Preferences>Universal Access" click on the "Seeing" tab, then the "Options" button, and check the "Smooth Images" checkbox.

 

[Eraserhead]

I'm not sure if this what you're talking about... Go to "System Preferences>Universal Access" click on the "Seeing" tab, then the "Options" button, and check the "Smooth Images" checkbox.

It still doesn't look great though...

 

[2ndPath]

Nope, unless they completely rewrite the zooming routines. Right now zooming just enlarges the bitmap of the screen. On the other hand, it works with everything, not just a few apps.

--Eric

Ok. Resolution independence of the OS however, should make the implementation of that zoom routine much easier, because the scaling of all elements can be done by standard OS routines, whereas now all the interface is not scalable. I am pretty sure Apple would update the zoom feature to make use of the resolution independence just alone for presenting the resolution independent interface. The zoom is almost perfect for that.

 

[balamw]

Windows does zoom - on my laptop at work, if I go Start>Programs>Accessories>Magnifier, the top part of the screen is zoomed in section, which follows the pointer around in the non-zoomed bottom half of the screen.

That is so not true. You can zoom in (and out, btw) in any MS Office app (as well as in IE) with CTRL+wheel scroll. And unlike in OSX, fonts are scaled such that they don't lose their sharpness. In OS X zooming in looks like zooming in on a low res jpg. Yuck!

Thats it....you have to go to Start>Programs>Accessories>Magnifier instead of just Ctrl>Scroll.

And then it only appears in a narrow panel at the top or bottom of your screen. I've shown an "oldie" the zoom on windows...they didn't end up using it 'coz it was too hard.....unlike Macs version.

As is usual with Windows, basic functionality is there, but it is nowhere near as easy to use or as universal.

Each app has it's own level of support for this zooming feature and for example IE6 would only scale the font this way, so embedded images/flash or particular websites where the font size was locked didn't scale well. Som much so that some poorly implemented CSS sites were unscalable in IE6. IE7 does a lot better, but it's still not the same since the menubars etc.. are not scaled only the content gets scaled.

Magnifier is not even close, since it provides a non-interactive magnified view of a small sliver of the screen. Microsoft even has a dialog that comes up saying

"Magnifier is intended to provide a minimum level of functionality for users with slight visual impairments. Most users with visual impairments will need a magnification utility program with higher functionality for daily use."

B

 

[akadmon]

Nope, unless they completely rewrite the zooming routines.

--Eric

In that case, can somebody explain to me what Resolution Independence is all about?

 

[2ndPath]

In that case, can somebody explain to me what Resolution Independence is all about?

This resolution independence basically means that if you display the interface of a program on two screens with different resolutions (like for example same size but different number of pixels) the interface of the program will have the same size on both screen (when you take a ruler to measure the size). However on the screen with the higher resolution the picture will be rendered more fine grained, because of the higher number of pixels available in the same area of the screen. Right now the size of interface elements is a fixed number of pixels in most cases and thus will have a different size on different resolution screens.

The technology needed to achive this needs to be able to scale all interface elements. If this is implemented correctly it would also enable the user not to use the same size of the interface on any screen, but adjust it regardless of the resolution of the screen to match personal preferences. So some people (especially those with poor eye sight) will prefer bigger interface elements while others will want as many elements displayed on screen as possible and thus smaller individual elements. So far to accomodate these needs you had to pick a screen of appropriate resolution. For desktop computers this isn't really a problem because the screen is not tied to the computer. For laptops this is more difficult which is why many manufacturers offer different choices for the built-in displays. Apple, however, have never done this. With a resolution independent interface they can use high resolution displays to satisfy the customers which want to make as much use of their screen space as possible while still providing an appropriate solution for people who want bigger interface elements.

Edit: For an example there is some more information here with an example picture.

 

[Nutter]

... as for the zooming feature, at the moment it just works by enlarging the final, composited screen image. Since this image is at the resolution of the screen, enlarging it will produce blocky results even if the image was originally generated using resolution independence.

Once resolution independence is in place the zoom feature could probably be re-implemented in a completely different way to allow smooth scaling, but it's not trivial.

 

[Eric5h5]

Once resolution independence is in place the zoom feature could probably be re-implemented in a completely different way to allow smooth scaling, but it's not trivial.

Yep. The current "enlarge the screen bitmap" method in some ways could be considered a quick hack. A "true" zoom would be much slower because the entire screen would actually have to be re-drawn in a higher resolution, but computers are fast enough that it probably wouldn't be an issue.

--Eric