With the recent release of Mac OS 10.4. 8, apple added a cool little utility to the mac. It allows you to zoom in on any thing you are looking at one your mac. Now, this may not seem like the coolest thing you have ever seen, but you have to admit, it is nice to zoom in on things once and a while, and the convenience google map drag bar isn’t around when you need it.

While eneabled on all macs, desktop macs must have a scroll wheel mouse attached (I have a Might Mouse), but any mac laptop will work.

So, if you are on a desktop mac with a scroll wheel mouse, go ahead and hold down the control button and scroll. Scrolling up will zoom in, while scrolling down will zoom back out. You can also zoom in and let go of the control button, to keep the zoom level where it is. Pretty sweet, I am sure I will find some use for this. Also, take a look at your curser, you can move it around and it will zoom in on where your curser is on the screen, so as you are zoomed in, you can move the curser to another part of the screen without having to zoom out and back in.

On a mac laptop, the process is similar. Go ahead and hold the control key, and then with two fingers on the trackpad, move your fingers up to zoom in and down to zoom out. Sweet!

On my mac mini, there is no option to turn this off, but not big deal, it isn’t like I hold my control button down all the time while scrolling. However, you can image on a laptop, things can happen, and if you don’t know about this cool feature, I could imagine you may freak out of your screen starts zooming in for no apparent reason. So, laptopers, go to your System Preferences and to the Keyboard and Mouse control panel. There you will find a handy dandy check box to turn the feature off, along with a chooser box to set the key you hold down to activate. I suggest to keep it set as the control key, it has to be the leased used key on my keyboard.

You may need to zoom in a little on the picture to see it clearly, but at least you know how to now!

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