By SteveJack

Ever want to peer at something a little more closely, but don’t want to stop, change display properties to a lower resolution, look at whatever it is, then change display properties back to your normal resolution? You don’t have to – if you have at least Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar.

Due to the amount of emails we continue to receive about zooming in OS X, we’re covering this zoom feature again today for those that missed our previous coverage.

Mac OS 10.2 introduced a lovely new Zoom feature designed for people who need the ability to zoom in and out at will, which covers pretty much all of us:

[Command,Option,8] toggles Zoom on and off. That’s “Apple, Option, Eight” in English.
[Command,Option,=] zooms in, centering on the cursor position when Zoom is on. “Apple, Option, Equal Sign”
[Command,Option,-] zooms out. “Apple, Option, Minus Sign”

That’s it! And it zooms waaaaaaaaaaaaay in. Try it. It will zoom out to your display’s current resolution, as you would expect. If you move the cursor while “zoomed” in, you will scroll around the screen. By the way, it’s a neat trick to play on a fellow Mac OS X user – just jump on his or her machine when they’re not looking and zoom really far in, leave it that way and watch them try to figure it out. More options for other accessibility capabilities are in the “Universal Access” pane of System Preferences.

SteveJack is a long-time Macintosh user, web designer, multimedia producer and a regular contributor to the MacDailyNews Opinion section.

[UPDATE: 3:08pm EDT: Fixed author byline and description. Thanks, Lou Grant.]