OSX Usability Nicety #87886

In OS X, scrolling the mouse wheel whilst holding ctrl allows you to zoom in to any of the desktop pretty much infinitely. From there you can pan around any of the desktop you need to with your imaginary mangifying glass. It’s a really useful little feature for when you need to quickly scrutinise an image, text which isn’t resizable for whatever reason or any other piece of UI chrome.

However, what I particularly love, from a usability point of view, is the fact that if you scroll back to almost the regular size — say, just one notch off — when you next move the mouse pointer, the desktop will snap back to a 1:1 zoom, as if by magic. In other words, you can’t accidentally leave the desktop in anything but an obviously zoomed state — perfect for when it’s been activated by accident or when you haven’t quite returned it back to normal.

July 2nd, 2007 | Usability • Apple/OS X |

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