Nick is correct. OS X 10.4 (Tiger) features full screen zooming as he described. I don’t understand why one (Jeff) would repeatedly question it without at least taking the 5 seconds it takes to Google it and verify it. Just Google:
“mac os x” desktop zoom
It’s a very useful feature which is enabled/disabled in the Keyboard Mouse System Preferences. When zoomed in on any portion of the screen, you can navigate to other areas of the screen simply by moving the mouse.
Just tried the Raskin Flash demo. Nothing original there. The exact same functionality has been in OS X for over two years (Tiger was released in April 2005). See previous post as well as Nick’s posts. Everything you can do in that Flash demo you can do in Tiger.
I use OS X desktop zoom all the time – so I can put youtube videos full screen, or so I can take pictures that I’ve got in iPhoto and full screen them so people further away can see them.
I’ve made a mockup of a desktop using ZUI and it is for my use as a graphic designer the perfect desktop replacement.
please enjoy at http://www.kub.fr/design/Grape.html
Some mouse software binds one of the X buttons on mice to use as a zoom. I have it at work for quickly zooming into Photoshop images.
Thought I would share that may be the closest to in OS zooming I have experienced. Plus it integrates seamlessly into flow of working.
Good post though, I believe zoom UI is much more needed though in future applications.
What we’re talking about is zooming not just the contents of the browser window, but everything on the desktop-- every window, every icon, every pixel.
This is precisely what the zooming feature in OS X does. It’s an accessibility feature I think, can’t remember how to use it.
Mandriva Linux has something like this, called Metisse.
OS X’s universal access zooms the screen, the entire screen, not just a window, the entire screen. it does (at this time anyway) do this by scaling the bitmap on the screen (realtime) and applying (if the user chooses) a bicubic filter to smooth out edges.
in a default setup of OS X Tiger, you need only press ctrl and scroll to activate, but you can set a whole bunch of options in System Preferences - Universal Access - Zoom.
It’s not perfect, but it gets the job done rather well as long as you’re not trying to get screenshots of the enlarged area.
So for once and for all, the zoom feature in OS X is not per app or per window or per whatever, it zooms everything. now if it could onlyzoom out and give me more space on my screen…
OS X’s universal access zooms the screen, the entire screen, not just a window, the entire screen. it does this (at this time anyway) by scaling the bitmap on the screen (realtime) and applying (if the user chooses) a bicubic filter to smooth out edges.
in a default setup of OS X Tiger, you need only press ctrl and scroll to activate, but you can set a whole bunch of options in System Preferences - Universal Access - Zoom.
It’s not perfect, but it gets the job done rather well as long as you’re not trying to get screenshots of the enlarged area.
So for once and for all, the zoom feature in OS X is not per app or per window or per whatever, it zooms everything. now if it could onlyzoom out and give me more space on my screen…
How did that happen? I’m pretty sure i only clicked submit once. Sorry for that either way.
Oberon/Bluebottle from ETH Zrich has a pretty cool version of a zoomable interface, and has had it for years. Worth checking out, I think a somewhat recent version can be found here:
When you refer to “post button below
this comment box”, it sounds like
you’re using in-browser zoom
Why is it so hard to believe that Mac OS X has native zooming built-in, and has had it for quite a bunch of years now? It’s for people with poor eyesight, I think. Actually, even Mac OS 9 had a similar feature, if I remember correctly. I use it to watch youtube videos in full-screen.
Just to point out, Windows has come with a tool that allows you to zoom in on arbitrary parts of the desktop since Windows 95. Type “magnify” in the run dialog. It works slightly differently though, in that it doesn’t magnify the entire screen.
The sort of stuff Aza envisions is not possible in MacOS currently. He is not just talking about simple zooming, but having the entire interface specifically designed around both zooming and the thus possible integration of applications with spacial awareness.
Currently in MacOS you can zoom in on the desktop and click icons, but you still have to explicitly click the icons to open them. Aza envisions simply zooming in on the icon and, once you have zoomed in close enough, the editor for the file is rendered in situ and you can start editing right there.
There is no longer, then, any distinction between open and closed documents and no concept of a forced hierarchy. You place your documents where you like in the 2D space and to edit, zoom into it and start editing.
The demo doesn’t do the concept full justice, as currently you are just zooming around a static image. But imagine being able to edit the stuff once you zoom in on it. There are, of course, a whole bunch of issues that then arise, some of which I don’t know how they will solve.
The videos good, I’d recommend it.
Lets not forget the Zoom UI in the Opera powered Wii Web Browser.
Its pretty awesome… It starts off showing the entire page and all you do is place your cursor over an area and hit the (+) button. It looks at the size of the content your cursor is over and zooms appropriately. You can then move up or down or zoom back out and select another area to zoom into.
Seems similar to what they might work well on the iPhone.
Also, WeFail.com, a design company, has done some pretty interesting site designs for merch companies on the zooming content, starting out very far… and then either letting you zoom in, or doing it for you depending on your selection. I think they get quite a few things right in these “experimental” websites.
Here are a few to check out
http://www.bbdo.com/
http://www.mailorderchickens.org/
http://www.archive.amplifier.sofake.com/
http://facingnewyork.com/
By the way, the BBDO site is so cool. If you play an audio (check out the one on Singapore), then zoom around, you can hear the volume become softer or louder and as you pan around, the audio appears on the left or the right hand side.
[ICR] is right, of course, while Mac OS X offers some kind of zoomable interface, it’s not what Oberon implements or what Aza envisions. Again, I would encourage everyone to have a look at Bluebottle/Oberon. It has had precisely that kind of zoomable interface for years.
I remember when I first saw it. One of the developers showed us a presentation of Bluebottle running on Bluebottle. Starting up, he had a lot of files lying on his desktop. Among them were the slides of his presentation, aligned horizontally. He simply zoomed into the first slide until it was full-screen to start the presentation. Pretty cool and intuitive if you ask me.
So I know I’m commenting late but I had to post this. I had an old IBM Think pad that was actually nice to use. When I got it I was checking out what extra functions it had on the keys and one of them was the “Func+Zoom In/Out”, I was curious to see it so I did “Zoom In”. This is where the magic happened, that button all it did was change the resolution on the laptop screen from 1024x768 to 800x600 and so on… That is some kick ass new zooming technology there buddy!
LMAO
another example is Zdesktop, a zoomable file system explorer you can find at