Trackpad Zoom
Written on April 25, 2007 by Nick Santilli and 7 people have commented
I consider myself pretty savvy on the Mac. But as the saying goes, you learn something new every day, right?
Enter OS X Hacker. A Trackpad setting in the System Preferences that I never paid any attention to before. Hold down your control key and push two fingers upward on the trackpad. Quickly zoom in and out of your screen that easily. Cool huh? I agree.
Courtesy of LifeHacker
#1 Ian says:Gold! It works with a Mighty Mouse scroll ball and Control as well!
#2 Justin says:Heh heh, yeah.
That was one of the first things I discovered when I switched to mac, completely by accident. I had my bluetooth Mighty Mouse paired, and I had control down, because I hadn’t yet got used to using the key instead of control for keyboard shortcuts. I bumped the wheel of the mouse and…what the hell? My whole screen zoomed in!
I freaked out for a moment before I realised it was just a cool accessibility feature.
#3 dave says:This is very useful for finding single pixel gaps in CSS layouts.
#4 Alef Arendsen says:This has also helped me a lot during presentations and code demos I’m frequently doing. People are always asking me what kind of hack it is ;-).
#5 Nino says:Like Justin I discovered it by accident, but then turned it off, since I can’t seem to figure when and why I would use it.
Also, it only seems to work with Powerbook/Macbook Pro from what I can tell. At least they don’t offer this feature on iBook (don’t know about the Macbook)
#6 abelara says:it does work on the macbooks. and i use it when watching streaming videos and such to make the video “almost” full screen just by zooming the whole screen.
i also zoom when watching a dvd with a wide angle ratio and i’d like it to fill the whole screen. i zoom until it does.
it’s also cool just to show PC friends.
#7 Matt says:Similarly Alt-Cmd and ‘+’ will zoom in (if you have it turned on in the universal access prefs). I use that for zooming in on my Mac Mini media centre when the fonts or a video are a bit too small to see from the couch.
Another nice one is simulating the ‘delete’ key on laptop keyboards that only have backspace…Fn-backspace