[Todd Madson]

Why did I not know about this?

With a wheel mouse:

-press and hold the control key
-move the wheel forward to increase the size of the screen
-back to go back to normal

So....what else is there like that that I'm unaware of? I stumbled
across it in Safari but when I minimized it it seemed to work at the
OS level too.

[Chuckit]

That's not resolution independence. Notice how things get kind of blurry and pixellated and you lose sight of part of the screen? It's just zooming the picture in. With resolution independence, you can control the size of all the elements on the screen.

[Todd Madson]

I'm still impressed that this feature is there and it can come in handy at times...

Are there any undocumented features like that you know of besides this?

[Chuckit]

Well, the zooming thing isn't exactly undocumented — it's in the Universal Access preference pane. There's a few other settings in there, which may or may not be useful. Otherwise, check out the Keyboard Shortcuts tab in the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane. It lists and lets you change most of the universal key commands. The dictionary (control-apple-D) is pretty useful. Also, if you do the command for taking a picture of a selection (apple-shift-4) and then hit space, it'll switch modes to let you take a picture of an entire window.

[Mithras]

It's my understanding that Vista's "FatBits" (or whatever -- zooming software) does in fact do pretty, vector-based zooming of text (and maybe other UI elements?).

Hopefully the zoom in 10.5 will scale text and some UI elements in nice fashion -- anyone hear anything about this one way or the other?

[Catfish_Man]

Originally Posted by Mithras 

It's my understanding that Vista's "FatBits" (or whatever -- zooming software) does in fact do pretty, vector-based zooming of text (and maybe other UI elements?).

Hopefully the zoom in 10.5 will scale text and some UI elements in nice fashion -- anyone hear anything about this one way or the other?

That's the resolution independence thing everyone's been babbling about for the past year or so.

[Don Pickett]

Originally Posted by Mithras 

It's my understanding that Vista's "FatBits" (or whatever -- zooming software) does in fact do pretty, vector-based zooming of text (and maybe other UI elements?).

I've read differing reports about it, some of which say Vista is resolution dependent, some of which say it isn't, and most of which head off into conversations above my technical ken. Don't have a copy here to answer the question for myself.

[Mithras]

Originally Posted by Catfish_Man 

That's the resolution independence thing everyone's been babbling about for the past year or so.

Well, I know that in 10.5 as in Tiger, you can muck with Quartz Debug to make an application appear larger or smaller than normal, via resolution independence. But I haven't heard anything about whether the Universal Access zoom will actually use those facilities, or if it'll just do the bitmapped-zoom it does now.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally Posted by Mithras 

Well, I know that in 10.5 as in Tiger, you can muck with Quartz Debug to make an application appear larger or smaller than normal, via resolution independence. But I haven't heard anything about whether the Universal Access zoom will actually use those facilities, or if it'll just do the bitmapped-zoom it does now.

I don't actually remember, but I'm going to guess no.

[QuadG5Man]

The control zooming works with the trackpad on my macbook, using two finger scrolling, cool.

[CaptainHaddock]

Originally Posted by Mithras 

It's my understanding that Vista's "FatBits" (or whatever -- zooming software) does in fact do pretty, vector-based zooming of text (and maybe other UI elements?).

It's supposed to be completely resolution independent, but it's pretty useless because it doesn't work with Microsoft's own flagship products, like Office 2007, which just become all pixellated at any size other than the default.

Hopefully the zoom in 10.5 will scale text and some UI elements in nice fashion -- anyone hear anything about this one way or the other?

Yes, there are Leopard screenshots floating around that show all the OS X widgets (buttons, status bars, etc.) zoomed in really big. Supposedly, Apple wants all Mac developers to have their apps completely vector-based and scalable by the end of the year.

[mdc]

Cabel has an interesting blog post about resolution independence.

The screen zooming is a neat feature and holding ^ and two finger scrolling a trackpad works nicely.
Other 'undocumented' features?

• Hold shift when you minimize, invoke expose, click through the System Preferences, or pretty much anything else animated in OS X.

• You can move the time and other icons on the right of your menu bar by holding command and dragging them.

• You can drag them off the menu bar (like you'd remove an icon from the dock). Put them back using their System Preference pane.

• Holding option while resizing Quicktime will resize the video to, how do I explain this? Less artifacty resolutions? Try it.

That's all I can think of right now.

[ramcosca]

Originally Posted by mdc 

• Hold shift when you minimize, invoke expose, click through the System Preferences, or pretty much anything else animated in OS X.

• Holding option while resizing Quicktime will resize the video to, how do I explain this? Less artifacty resolutions? Try it.

Funny. I just "discovered" the first one earlier today. The second one is for resizing the video to it's default size.

[iNigel]

cmd+= and cmd+- Zooms in and out of the application. Does not work on all apps though, I use this mostly in Safari on some small fonts used on some web sites.

[Aron Peterson]

Originally Posted by mdc 

Cabel has an interesting blog post about resolution independence.

The screen zooming is a neat feature and holding ^ and two finger scrolling a trackpad works nicely.
Other 'undocumented' features?

• Hold shift when you minimize, invoke expose, click through the System Preferences, or pretty much anything else animated in OS X.

• You can move the time and other icons on the right of your menu bar by holding command and dragging them.

• You can drag them off the menu bar (like you'd remove an icon from the dock). Put them back using their System Preference pane.

• Holding option while resizing Quicktime will resize the video to, how do I explain this? Less artifacty resolutions? Try it.

None of those have anything to do with resolution independence and have been around longer than Tiger.

[Deal]

If for some reason (such as looking at a star chart) you would like to invert the color of your monitor, hit Apple, Option, Control, 8

Hit it again to toggle back.