Unstable screens

[airforce]

Lately, I find that whenever I move my mouse either up or down or sideways, my screens move about 1/4 of an inch in the same direction as the mouse.....and this also happens with my Desktop although to a lesser extent.][]

Not a big problem, but annoying just the same.

Any ideas on how to solve (stop) this ?

Thanks

Airforce

[Dan Millar]

Sounds like you may have accidentally enabled the screen zoom function, on both computers...

If you look in your System Preferences/Universal Access, you can see if Zoom is on or off. If it is on, just toggle it off with the on/off button, or press option-command-8. When it is on, you can zoom in or out by by scrolling up and down with the mouse's wheel or ball while pressing the control-key.

If it isn't that, I think you may have a very unusual problem!

Happy Mac'ing!

Dan

[ben schmidt]

Nice diagnosis Dan!

The Screen Magnification feature in OS X is my most used feature. I use a laptop with no external monitor and have far from good vision, so I'm constantly zooming in and out. It always surprises me that Apple doesn't make a bigger deal of their built-in Screen magnification feature, and so many folks don't know about it.

So with the goal of encouraging folks to open up their Universal Access preference pane and enable Screen Magnification on their Macs, let me pull a couple of explanatory paragraphs from: http://www.apple.com/accessibility/macosx/vision.html

"Zoom is a built-in, full-screen magnifier that can magnify the items on the screen up to 40 times. You can activate it using keyboard commands, a button on the screen, a trackpad gesture, or the scroll ball (or wheel) on a mouse. Thanks to the powerful Quartz rendering engine in Mac OS X, text, graphics, and even motion video can be magnified without affecting system performance. There are three options for how the screen image moves as you type or move the mouse cursor. It can move continuously as you move the cursor; it can move only when the cursor reaches the edge of the screen; or it can move so that the cursor remains in the middle of the screen — great for those with a narrow field of vision. It's also possible to set a minimum and maximum magnification value for instant zooming to a particular magnification and to prevent the magnification from going too high or low, leaving the system unreadable."

[Dan Millar]

Yeah, I hope it's the right diagnosis! I've seen this happen more than once, or I, like airforce, would be puzzled by this seemingly odd behaviour. It is a great, unsung feature, which will get even cooler once resolution independence becomes part of OS X. Then, when you zoom in, everything will stay nice and sharp. Now, if only Apple would implement what I call the "Blade Runner" filter - they could do the same with pictures - I see them do it all the time on CSI and in movies - from video surveillance footage even!

Happy Mac'ing!

Dan

[ben schmidt]

Blade Runner Filter! Good one.

For those who haven't watched Ridley Scott's ground-breaking Blade Runner recently, courtesy of Youtube, here's the exact scene showing Harrison Ford's character, Rick Deckard, zooming repeatedly into a photo, without loss of resolution:

• Esper Photo Analysis

Talk about your infinite photo resolution! As well as some nice 3D!