Magnify On The Fly

One of the things that makes the Mac OS intuitive is Apple’s use of universal symbols. Apple also extends these symbols to most of their software titles, creating a cohesive environment. The most common examples are Apple’s use of ‘+’ and ‘-’ symbols for adding and deleting, magnifying glass icon for searching and the gear icon for changes or additional options.

While the use of these universal symbols adds to the usability of the OS, they are sometimes overlooked. The symbol that I find is most commonly overlooked is the magnification slider found in Finder and in iPhoto. Just yesterday a customer emailed support with a screenshot of iPhoto. It appeared that he was looking at single large image, and he was writing because he couldn’t get himself into “thumbnail view” despite having clicked on ‘Photos’. I immediately looked at the lower right of the screenshot and saw that his magnification slider was slid all the way to the right, which is the highest magnification. He was in thumbnail view; his thumbnails had just been blown up to the full window size. By dragging the slider back towards the left, he was able to view the pictures in a more traditional thumbnail size.

This slider can come in pretty handy, though! Not only is it nice to temporarily blow thumbnails up to a more viewable size, or scale them down to a mini-size if you have a ton of photos and want to scroll through them quickly, but it can also easily be used in Finder when viewing a Finder window in icon view.

Try it out! Open a new Finder window by clicking on the smiling blue Mac-face in your dock (or, if you love menus, you can go to the Finder and to File > New Finder Window). Now navigate to a folder with many documents or pictures in it; it’s much more fun with pictures! Get yourself into icon view by selecting the icon that looks like four squares on the top left of the Finder window. You should now see the slider on the bottom right and you can play around by dragging the slider to the left and right and watch your icons grow and shrink.

Being able to resize photos and documents on the fly makes it even easier to find the item you want quickly. If you’re rocking Leopard or Snow Leopard, check out the Quicklook feature (select a document or picture in Finder and press the space bar) which helps fine-tune the process even further. Play around with it and have fun!