Quick Zoom on OSX

Last week I gave a presentation about Website Load testing and used Visual Studio to show some examples of the tests I had created.

I work at a fairly high resolution, too high for most people to see well when I toss my desktop up on a projector. Instead of dropping my resolution and working in an environment that I wasn't used to, I used the native zoom functionality in OSX to quickly move in and out of the areas that I wanted to highlight on the screen.

To enable zooming, go to System Preferences -> Accessibility, then Zoom. After that, check the box to "Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom:" I leave the default of "^Control".

Now while holding the control key on the keyboard, scroll the mouse, and viola! you can zoom in to the part of the screen occupied by your mouse. There are some other settings in that pane in System Preferences to let you customize how to move the zoomed in screen in relation to where the mouse is.