[mycatsnameis]

Anyone have a lead on a utility that will transform the cursor into a magnifying "lens"?

I'd love to be able to have a full PDF page open on my desktop but run the cursor over text that is too small to read and have it pop up readable (in full res) in real time.

I remember using something called "Coloristic" which would sort of let you do that in a window but it would simply magnify what was on the screen (i.e. the text would be bigger but no higher res than when unmagnified).

I figured with the integration of Quartz there might have been someone who addressed this in a program.

Ring any bells? I'd be happy to kick in $25 as a shareware fee for something like this if any developers are looking for ideas.

TIA
catman

[Rickster]

Well, there's Pixie which comes with the (free!) OS X Developer Tools. Lots of magnification options there.

[mycatsnameis]

Good tip, thanks, I checked it out and it works very similarly to Coloristic.

Two points though, I was looking for something that would float with the cursor. Imagine a cursor that looked like a magnifying lens (user definable diameter) that you could float around the screen magnifying the images under it in real time.

My second wish would be that the magnified image would not be confined to the resolution of the image on the screen (e.g. what you get with Pixie is a magnified image from the 72 dpi or whatever that shows up on the screen). PDFs and dynamic fonts will scale with magnification, it would be neat to have the lens scale the resolution with the mag level so the "enlarged" text would be smooth and readable.

Does anyone know of such an app?
TIA
catman

[ARENA]

I don't think any app like that exists. But it'd be a really cool thing to have.
Maybe if you post in the developer forum you might get someone interested in building it.

[Ken at Omni]

Originally posted by mycatsnameis:
<STRONG>Two points though, I was looking for something that would float with the cursor. Imagine a cursor that looked like a magnifying lens (user definable diameter) that you could float around the screen magnifying the images under it in real time.</STRONG>

Cocoa's standard color panel does this, just bring up the Color panel (if you're in OmniWeb right now, type Shift-Command-C) and click on the magnifying glass at the bottom.

(Though no, it doesn't magnify many pixels at once, and it doesn't let you set the diameter.)

[mycatsnameis]

Is there someway to do this from the Finder? I'm not a developer but I do have Tools installed.

I guess I should d/l Omni Web too .

As an aside I realized that what I was really looking for was some dynamic way to "Dockify" my entire desktop. Something that I could toggle on and off that would magnify the contents of the desktop as I ran the cursor over it in exactly the same way that the dock works when Magnify is toggled on. The difference in resolution b/w X and 9.x icons exemplifies the problem. All the magnification apps that I've used to not scale the res of the underlying image like the dock does with X icons.

This gives me some hope that something like this is doable since its already implemented in the OS itself. Someone must have worked out the problem as some point. The only thing that I'm not sure of is whether memory managment would be an issue here. I imagine that the reason that dock icons scale so well is that a "full res" version of the icon is preloaded into RAM whereas preloading a full res version of a PDF (for e.g.) might represent a hurdle that would need to be overcome for this scheme to work.

Still I'd certainly be willing to pay a decent shareware fee for something that would work like this and I bet I'm not alone.