Wednesday April 25th 2007, 1:05 pm 
By 
Tags: Working on your latest pixel-perfect design? I don’t know about you, but I am. I need to zoom in and look at my design really closely, at the pixel level. How do I do that?
- Open System Preferences
- select Keyboard & Mouse
- select Trackpad
- Enable “Zoom while holding Control”
Great. Done. Now, while holding control, drag on your Trackpad using two fingers. Let’s take a look at OSX Hacker.
Hold CTRL + drag, and Zoooom’in:
April 25th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
[...] close, or just impressing/confusing the hell out of your co-workers. — Gina Trapani Magic Zoomin’ [OS X [...]
April 25th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
Why am i missing these preferences? OS X 10.4.9… i’m on an ibook g4.
April 25th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
I am missing these preferences also (Powerbook g4) OSX 10.4.9
April 25th, 2007 at 11:30 pm
I don’t have them, either. Is that just with a Macbook and MBPro?
April 25th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
Apparently so. Works fine on my (Intel) Macbook. Great tip!
April 25th, 2007 at 11:53 pm
Missing on my MacBook Core Duo from last summer.. :(
April 26th, 2007 at 12:52 am
[...] OS X Hacker. A Trackpad setting in the System Preferences that I never paid any attention to before. Hold down [...]
April 26th, 2007 at 3:04 am
Yeah, this only works for Apple laptops that support two-finger scrolling on their track pads. My 3.5 year old Powerbook G4 does not have it. I use xScope from the IconFactory instead.
April 26th, 2007 at 6:20 am
[...] learning new stuff every day on my MacBook Pro. Today, OS X Hacker points out how you can zoom in on any part of the screen, simply by holding control and dragging [...]
April 26th, 2007 at 6:42 am
I’ll probably bite myself for asking this later, but since I’m pretty new to the mac stuff (mine arrived 2 days ago)… How do I get out of the zoom mode ! I’m currently stuck at maximum zoom !
April 26th, 2007 at 7:51 am
For all those who claim it’s missing from their Intel Mac notebooks …
It has worked fine on my three year old PowerBook G4 (with iScroll) ever since the OS update that added it (10.4.7?) so I can’t imagine the feature isn’t on a one year old MacBook (pro)
April 26th, 2007 at 7:54 am
Iko
just hold control and two-finger scroll DOWN
or, as long as zooming is activated (System Prefernces>Universal Access>Seeing>Zoom) … you can Cmd-Opt– (hyphen)
April 26th, 2007 at 7:56 am
[...] up close, or just impressing/confusing the hell out of your co-workers. — Gina Trapani Magic Zoomin’ [OS X [...]
April 26th, 2007 at 10:32 am
This also works if you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, since the two-finger scrolling is the same action as the scroll wheel.
However, don’t rely on this for pixel-perfect precision, as Quartz is doing a lot of real-time pixel blending to make it not look like pixelated ass when it scales. If you’re working on design, you WANT it to look like pixelated ass when you zoom, though. There may be a preference to turn off smoothing somewhere (and if it exists, it’s probably in Universal Access), although I can’t confirm because I’m not at my Mac right now.
April 30th, 2007 at 6:58 am
@Steve
Yes you can turn smoothing off so that you can see the raw pixels. It’s in System Prefs-Keyboard and Mouse-Trackpad-zooming options.
There are also alternate cursor follow methods, which is pretty damn well thought out if you ask me.
May 3rd, 2007 at 3:47 am
I had this on my PowerPC G5 once but now it’s gone.
Does anyone know how to get it back? I don’t have this option in my menu.
May 10th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
For some reason I don’t have the option to turn the mouse zoom on or off, or select another key other than ctrl, in my mouse preferences pane (I’m running 10.4.9, PPC G5) - it’s simply not there at all. Whilst I was delighted with finding this little gem, it screws with Illustrator’s settings to which I am very much accustomed so I want to turn it off. Does anyone know how?
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