ZoomMagic

Overview
ZoomMagic is a powerful tool to magnify any portion of your screen, measure distances or capture a screen area. Targeted users are:

  • Designers and developers on the hunt for those lost pixels,
  • .. or in the need for a fast screencapture,
  • Users with visual impairments,
  • Anybody who needs to measure distances/areas, find the shortest distance between A and B or quickly zoom into a screen portion.

Screenshot:



Zoom Up/Down
doubleclick the left/right mousebutton or use the hotkeys '+','-' or the mouse wheel or the Quickzoom popup from the upper left. Select 'Smooth Zoom' from the Mainmenu to have a less pixelized display.

Move ZoomMagic, left-/rightclick the window anywhere (except the buttons!) and move it. Tip: it is easier to click in the display window to move it.

Visual impaired users
ZoomMagic offers useful functions to help users with visual impairments to enlarge and read portions of the screen.

1. Set ZoomMagic into the Zoom at Screen Cursor Mode to magnify the screen portion around the current mouse location.

  • If 'Smooth Zoom' is on (hot key 'z'), you may increase and decrease the Zoom level in 0.1 steps using the up/down arrow keys or use the slider in the Settings dialog.

  • You may hide the cursor by unchecking the 'Show Cursor' Checkbox in the Settings dialog.

  • When editing text, the Zoomfocus follows the Caret if the 'Follow Text Input' option in the Settings dialog is checked.

  • You may force ZoomMagic to only be visible if the cursor is above a certain window. To use this feature, in the Zoom Cursor Mode, move the cursor to the window you want to zoom and press the left CTRL-Button. To return to normal mode, press the right CTRL-Button or from the taskbar, click the ZoomMagic icon and 'Restore'.

2.    Align to screen borders
Clicking one of the red arrows in the 'Align to Screen Border' button aligns the window to the top, bottom, left or right of the screen and automatically switches to 'Zoom at Screen Cursor' mode. Alternatively, use the hotkeys 'Pg Up', 'Pg Dn', left or right arrow key to align to the borders. Press 'h' to hide the Top- and Bottom Panel, press 'h' again to reshow them.
Press 'ENTER' or click the blue sphere in the middle to return to the previous state (position and size).

Measure Distance
Click the 'Measure Distance' button to activate the 'Measure Distance' mode. Click a point in the active Zoom window to start measurement. If the 'Show Bottom Panel' is active, the distance in pixels is displayed at the Bottompanel. Below the display of the pixels-distance, the distance in the selected unit is shown. The default unit is 'cm' and refers to the screen resolution (pixels per cm). To change the unit, rightclick the bottom statuspanel to show the Units Popupmenu and choose a unit from the 'Select Unit' entry. You may also select the unit from the Mainmenu. To gauge (or scale) the unit, doubleclick the bottom statuspanel to edit the value or alternatively choose 'Gauge Distance' from the Units Popup or the Mainmenu. To measure an area, place the points surrounding the area and finally press the hotkey 'a' to close the line (or, alternatively, hold down the shiftkey and doubleclick a point within the window). The surrounded area's value is displayed after the length's value.

The Units Popupmenu (also mirrored into the Mainmenu in 'Measure Distance' mode):

Click 'Set Default' to reset the units to 'cm'and the screen resolution.

Press the Delete- or ESC-key to cancel Measure Distance mode.

Capture Image
Click the 'Capture Image' button to capture a dedicated portion of the screen. Draw and adjust the running frame to the area to be captured. The position and dimension of the frame is shown on the Bottompanel and corresponds to the Zoomlevel. Use the Keyboard Cursor Hot Keys as described below (Hot Keys in 'Capture Image' mode) to fine adjust the frame. Click the 'Capture Image' button again or use the frame's right popup menu to cancel capturing, to capture to the clipboard or to a file. Saving to a file, you may adjust some compression parameters in the Settings-Dialog. The file-savedialog remembers the last saved filetype and offers this as default (the first extension in the 'Save as type' dropdown).
You may also use the hotkey CTRL + c to copy the entire view to the clipboard.

Supported file write formats:

  Joint Photographic Experts Group (*.jpg)
  JPEG2000 (*.jp2)
  JPEG2000 Code Stream (*.j2k)
  CompuServe images (*.gif)
  Standard Windows bitmap images ( *.bmp)
  TIFF images (*.tiff )
  Truevision images (*.tga )
  ZSoft Paintbrush images (*.pcx, *.pcc)
  Portable pixel/gray map images (*.pxm, *.ppm, *.pgm, *.pbm)

Press the Delete- or ESC-key to cancel capturing.

Zoom at Screen Cursor
Click the 'Zoom at Screen Cursor' button or the hotkey 'c' to magnify the screen portion around the current mouse location. Adjust the parameters of this mode in the Settings-Dialog.

Press the Delete- or ESC-key to cancel 'Zoom at Screen Cursor' mode.

Mainmenu
The Mainmenu drops down clicking the button or using the hotkey combination ALT + m and shows the following entries:

Smooth Zoom: Check 'Smooth Zoom' to have a less pixelized display.

Stay on Top: Switch 'Stay on Top' on/off to change the StayOnTop property.

Settings..
Opens the Settingsdialog:



Adjust parameters for

  • General: Options to display the Colorvalue, the Zoomlevel or Mouseposition on the Bottompanel.
    Show the Zoom Focuspoint (the point where you zoomed in/out). If this option is on, the Zoom Focuspoint is indicated with little black markers at the borders of ZoomMagic:


    Set the format and type of the colorvalue. Set the intermediate Zoomvalue in 0.1 steps for the 'Smooth Zoom' Mode with the slider at the bottom.

  • Zoom at cursor: In 'Zoom at Screen Cursor' mode, the area around the cursor is captured on a regular basis. This might - depending on your system - impact systemperformance. Adjust the refreshrate here.
    If you want the Zoomfocus to follow the Caret when editing text, check the 'Follow Text Input' option.
    To hide the cursor, uncheck the 'Show Cursor' Checkbox.

  • Capture to file: Adjust some compression parameters when capturing to file.
    The higher the Jpg-Quality value, the better the image quality will be, but the larger the file size. The lower the Jpg-Quality value, the smaller the resulting file size will be, but at the expense of picture quality.
    Tiff Compression 'Packbits' is a lossless compression method.

  • Appearance: Skinoptions to adjust the appearance of ZoomMagic.

  • System Info: Shows the screen resolution of the display in Pixels Per Inch. This value is used for the default 'Measure Distance' scale.

Hot Keys

  • +,- : zoom up/down.
  • d : switch 'Measure Distance' mode on/off.
  • p : in 'Measure Distance' mode, remove the last point.
  • a : in 'Measure Distance' mode, close the contour and calculate the surrounded area.
  • c : switch 'Zoom at Screen Cursor' mode on/off.
  • z : switch 'Smooth Zoom' on/off.
  • h : hide/show borders, Top- and Bottompanels.
  • b : hide/show the Bottompanel.
  • m, Pg Up : align at screen top and switch to 'Zoom at Screen Cursor' mode.
  • Pg Dn : align at screen bottom and switch to 'Zoom at Screen Cursor' mode.
  • Arrow key left: align to the left of the screen and switch to 'Zoom at Screen Cursor' mode.
  • Arrow key right: align to the right of the screen and switch to 'Zoom at Screen Cursor' mode.
  • Enter : return to the state (position and size) before aligning to the screen borders, normal mode.
  • Delete : Return to normal mode.
  • ESC : Editing the gauge value, resets this value, otherwise return to normal mode.
  • Left CTRL : in 'Zoom at Screen Cursor' mode, zoom only the window below the current cursor position.
  • Right CTRL : stop the 'zoom only the window below the current cursor position' mode.
  • F1 : show this help.
  • F5 : refresh.
  • ALT + m : drops down the Mainmenu.
  • ALT + F4 : Exit.
  • CTRL + c : copy view to clipboard.
  • CTRL + Keyboard Cursor Keys : move the window one pixel in the corresponding direction.
Hot Keys in 'Capture Image' mode:
  • Keyboard Cursor Keys : move the frame one pixel in the corresponding direction.
  • SHIFT + Keyboard Cursor Keys : size the frame one pixel in the corresponding direction.

Register

To register, open the About Dialog (Mainmenu, About/Register entry) to find the serial of the program. With this serial, visit www.PeakStars.com to obtain the Registration Key.

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Tutorial: How I finally found the length of my jogging distance.

To find the length of my NY jogging distance,
I visited www.MapQuest.com to get a map of Manhatten:




First, I select the unit, let's choose km:





Second, use the scale of the map to gauge ZoomMagic:




Third, I draw a line along my jogging path.
As I also want to see the enclosed area, I close the line with the hotkey 'a'.




Et voilą,
finally I found my NY jogging distance to be 10.57 km or 11560 yards or 6.57 miles,
enclosing an area of 1.98 km².

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