 If you want to be able to zoom in on a portion of your screen for the purposes of doing screen demos and the like, then there is a way that you can do this with some built-in functionality in macOS, and that is what I'll be telling you about in this video. Hello, welcome to Take One Tech, my name's Alec, and you all know if you are a regular viewer, what a fan of ProMouse I am. It's something that I use all the time on my channel to basically highlight areas of the screen and to zoom in and things like that and to spotlight. But I know that not everybody is a fan, not everybody seems to have quite the results I have with that app because it's worked flawlessly for me, but sadly not for everybody. So today I want to tell you about another option that you have that does actually still work with ProMouse as well, so you can have the best of both worlds. But that is an accessibility feature that is built into macOS that allows you to zoom in on a part of the screen. And so if you use this when you're doing screen demos, doing screen sharing and things like that and in demo mode, in Ecamm Live, then it can sort of help you to get your point across and show just the parts of the screen that you need people to see. Now, I've got to say first of all, thank you very much to Phil Binks because it was him that told me about this on my last live stream actually as it happens. And then I came straight off that live stream and went on to start watching one of Dot Rocks and he was talking about the exact same thing. So Phil got there first though. So I'll leave a link to Phil's channel which is helpful, Phil. I'll leave a link to that up in the top corner. That's got loads of great tutorials and stuff like that. And if you like the sort of stuff that I'm covering on here with Ecamm Live tutorials and so on, then definitely go and give him a watch as well because there's lots of great stuff on there. So let's get into exactly how it works, shall we? There we are in the, in fact, no we're not, we've gone straight, I've skipped ahead. Sorry about that. If you open up system preferences on the Mac, then you do have this accessibility tab here. So this one. So you want to click on the accessibility and then in here there's lots of different accessibility features that you can have a browse through because there are some more of them that they're obviously intended for people who have accessibility issues with the interface and so on. But some of these have other uses. In fact, that's exactly what we're doing with this one, which is this zoom tool. So I'm going to click on to zoom, and then zooming, making it bigger as opposed to the Zoom communications app. As if that wasn't obvious. So here you've got a few keyboard shortcuts. First of all, let me just actually demo it, shall I, just to show you what we're talking about before we get into how to set it all up. And I'm going to come into my demo mode. And as you can see, I've got a bit of a big screen here. It's a 4K screen. And so I'm guessing that it's probably hard to see some of this writing over here in these little windows and things like that. So when I'm doing screen demos, normally what I would do is I would actually take my 4K display and I would scale it down to 1080p so that it's a little bit more readable when I'm sharing the full screen like this. But actually now what I can do is I can simply just zoom in on a particular area of the screen. So let's say I want to just zoom in on just this main window and the ECAM controls. And now hopefully you can see these a little bit better. And I can still use my ProMouse by the way. I can still use the Zoom feature on that on top of it. And I can also use my little spotlight as well. So that is basically what this Zoom tool allows you to do. And so let's have a look now at exactly how you set it up and these settings. So first of all, there is a keyboard shortcut that you can assign to this, or there is one pre-assigned I should say, to actually toggle the Zoom on and off. Let's just have a look at what that looks like. This is command option eight. So if I come back into my demo mode and I press command option and eight, you'll see that it just sort of zooms in a little bit. There we go. And then I can press command option and the plus and minus to basically zoom in and out further. So that is how you do it manually by pressing the keys. But what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you how to come in here and you can also have this gesture, use a scroll gesture with a modifier key. So basically, if you've got a scroll wheel on your mouse or if you're using a trackpad, then you can come to here and you can change the modifier key. So I've got it as control. So all I'm doing now is I just hold down my control key and then turn my little scroll wheel like that. Now, I should say the default behavior of this is that when you scroll in, the pointer stays, it scrolls into where your pointer is on the screen. And then obviously now we're cropped into the center. So this might not be the place that we want. So you can move the mouse over to the edge and when you move over to the mouse over to the edge, then it will sort of move the edge of the viewing area if you like with you. So I'm moving over to the side here. Then if I move down to the bottom, it will get that edge there. So that is one way to do it. But personally, I find that if I go up into the top corner and then scroll with the mouse right in that top corner, then it's gonna just keep that nicely centered, not centered, it's gonna keep that top corner in the top corner and I'm just zooming in on that portion of the screen, which actually for the sorts of demos that I do works out well for me because I tend to just have things positioned and those positions on the screen. And so I can just zoom in on the particular area that I want to show. And so that just zooms in quite nicely by having the mouse in one of the corners. There is some ways that you can do this in a little bit of a different way that I'll come on to in a moment when we look at some of the advanced features that it's got. But also I should mention the zoom style. So here there are three zoom styles. We've just had a look at the full screen one, which is the default, but you can also have it in split screen. I don't think that this is gonna be particularly useful for this use case that we're talking about here. I'll just show it to you anyway, but if we toggle that one on and then I zoom in, you can see what's happening. We've got the regular size screen at the bottom and then the sort of zoomed view is up at the top, but it's not really well suited to screen sharing, I don't think in terms of doing demos and things like that. One that is perhaps useful is the picture in picture. So when I've got that one toggled and I zoom in, you can see how it's basically got this little window and it's just acting like, I suppose like a sort of square magnifying glass and I can still use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out on an area and it is just sort of highlighting it on the screen. So that one could be a useful one to use. Personally, I'm gonna stick with the full screen because like I say, I am still using this in conjunction with my beloved pro mouse that a lot of people don't seem to love quite as much as I do. So then I'm gonna come over to this one here, choose display. Now you may well think that you can see here that this is basically my monitor, is this one at the bottom and then let me come out of demo mode. My monitor is the one at the bottom and then at the top is my teleprompter monitor. So I'm not going to adjust these at the moment but if you've got one that's set to display to use for zoom, you might be forgiven for thinking. I'm forgiving myself because this is what I thought. You might be forgiven for thinking if you select one of these, the zoom will only affect that because actually what is happening is when you're zooming one screen, if you zoom out, you will actually see it go across all of the other screens as well. So it would have been nice if I could just have one screen that zooms. So that's what I actually thought that this does but actually if you have one of these displays selected, what that does is it shows the output of the zoom on that other display. So that's not at all what we're looking to try and achieve here. So you do probably for this use case want to leave that display as zooming for all. It's almost, yeah, not worth even going in there but I just thought I'd explain what that is. So then you've also got this option here, enable hover text. Now I'm going to toggle that one off but I've got it on just to show you what that is. So let's come into demo mode. I've just realized I've moved this out of the way, haven't I? That's no use. There we go. This one here, enable hover text. So just holding down the option key will do this and so let me just demo what this is. If you've got this activated and you hold down the option key and you hover over a piece of text then it basically just makes that larger on the screen so you can read it. So if I'm on some great website like the Ecam live website and then I hover over some text and then I just press the option key, it will just make it larger. So obviously this is an accessibility feature for people who find it hard to read and so it just makes the text larger on the screen. So next I'm going to go into the advanced section here. So if I click on that, we've basically got two tabs at the top. We've got appearance and controls. So appearance, there's a few different ways that you can have the zoom window if you like moving around or the zoom area moving around. Initially it's set to this only when the pointer reaches an edge. So that's how I had it so that when I zoom in it will basically zoom in on whatever area I zoom into. So if I move the mouse over this corner it will zoom down here but then the actual window will only change when I move the mouse to the edge. Well, there is this other option to move continuously with pointer. If I touch that one or switch that one on rather you can see that now as I move the pointer around it's moving all over the screen. This is not necessarily going to be the best way to do things if you are going to actually be physically demonstrating steps that people are taking. But if you do want it where you just literally want to be able to zoom in to highlight an area of the screen and then you're going to come straight back out of it then that might be actually the way to go because it's easier to sort of position the thing on screen. So like here if I wanted to just show this window and then maybe go across and show this one then having it sort of following the mouse round would be a good way to go. But if you're going to be doing sort of tutorial demo style things where you've got to show this, you know lots of different steps then yeah it might make people a little bit dizzy. There is a similar option which is this one in fact let me just use this while we've got it here. So if I click this one so the pointer is at or near the center of the screen it is very similar actually but there is just a little bit more sort of movement and it doesn't move quite as much. I don't think as the one at the top you can see there's some places where if you're near the center of the screen then it's not sort of bouncing all over the place. So that's just moving sort of from side to side, isn't it? Whereas if I come to this one then it's just basically following the cursor round entirely. So you've got a couple of other options here so I'll leave this one at the moment as it is so only when the pointer reaches the end of the screen that's going to suit the style of things that I'm doing which is like I say just zooming in on a specific part of the screen and then doing my demo as normally. So the other options you've got here are restore zoom factor on startup which would make sense just to have everything reset and then these other ones are not necessarily related to what we're talking about here. Smooth images so that's just obviously if you're zooming in on an image it doesn't become too pixelated and you don't get too much anti-aliasing along the edges. Then flash screen when notification ban appears outside the zoom view. So this is specifically like if you've got if you're zoomed in on a part of the screen and then you get a notification somewhere else on the screen this accessibility feature gives you a sort of flash to let you know that that's happened but for giving screen demos I'm guessing you probably don't want to be bugged by notifications anyway so that one can just stay off and follow keyboard focus just means it's going to follow wherever you are, whatever you are doing with the keyboard but again I'm going to leave that one off for now and then in the controls there are a few extra controls in here. So you can have it so that you can activate some or all of these and basically here we've got one to temporarily toggle the zoom so if you don't want to actually activate it in it zoom in and stay zoomed in you just want to quickly activate it you can hold down this key if you've got this one selected and that will just sort of activate the zoom for as long as you've got these keys held down. You've also got one to temporarily detach the zoom window from the pointer so the zoom window will the pointer will stay where it is on the screen but you can move the screen around. So it's actually a little bit the opposite way that I would have liked it to be honest because what I would have liked to have been able to do is zoom in and then when I hold down that key option and command you can see that basically now I've got a little it's leaving the pointer where it is that's that little pro mouse circle but now I can move the screen around. Ideally I would have liked it the opposite way so that I could use that sort of follow the screen with the pointer and then when I detach it I can move the mouse around but the screen stays where it is but anyway that's just my personal preference. That isn't what this thing is intended for so I'm not going to complain about it. There's also I showed you the difference between the full screen and the picture in picture so that was the one where it was like a little sort of square magnifying glass or rectangular magnifying glass. Well here if you want to be able to switch between the two kinds of magnification you can activate this one and so that will toggle between full screen and picture in picture so you can just toggle between those two and then also you've got one here to adjust the actual zoom window by keyboard shortcut as well. And these other ones are related to the maximum zoom size, the magnification and you can set limits and things like that as well but for now that is pretty much all that we're going to set for it and I've got that enable hover text off because that might conflict with some other stuff and I don't really use that but now we are basically good to go and so if I come back into my demo mode this is pretty much solved my large monitor problem and I probably won't be changing the resolution of my monitor like I always used to be changing it in and out when I was doing demos of stuff that I knew were going to contain a lot of detail. So thanks once again to Phil Binks for putting me onto that. I know lots of other people have been using it as well but I'm a bit late to the party with it so I hope it helps some of you as well. I'll definitely come out of demo mode, shall I? There we go. And yeah, it's a really great way to highlight areas of the screen and like I say, it will work with your, anything you've got on the screen so it will work with ProMouse, MousePosay or any of these other sort of mouse pointer applications as well. If you found this useful then don't forget to go and like it but also head over to Phil's channel and go and check out some of the other great stuff that he's got on there. So for now I'll leave a link to some other e-cam live stuff over on the right hand side and YouTube will pick a personally picked video just for you up in the top right. So until the next one, have a great day.