ZoomIt

ZoomIt is the best PC-desktop-screen-zoomer-inner-thingy I’ve ever seen – and it’s free!  Great for zooming in on presentations or during software demos – both of which I do at home and at the QSFT.  I wish I had found it earlier.  Here’s a quick video of me using it (be sure to select HD mode when viewing it).

I’ve been looking for a smooth screen-zooming tool ever since I saw uber geek Chris Prillo use one on his desktop when demonstrating software and websites during his YouTube videos. His PC is probably more powerful than mine, but I could see he wan’t using the standard Windows magnifier, which magnifies a screen area into a separate window – his zoomer was zooming the whole screen into itself.  ZoomIt seems to offer the same effect, and as well as being free, it’s also tiny – less than 300KB, allows you to draw and write on the zoomed in desktop, and on Vista the magnified desktop is “live”, rather than a freeze-frame.

And yes, Mac lovers, this desktop zoom effect is standard on recent Macs – I know, I know.

Proposed Sculpture

Scaled Sculpture

Thanks to twitterer JamezRC, I saw this article about an oddly elongated, and slightly controversial,  sculpture being built in the UK, and as soon as I saw the picture of the proposed design (on left) I, it struck me that it was just a normal head that had been stretched in software before being created.

So by squashing the image by about 66%, I ended up with a normal looking head (on right) – I wonder if the face belongs to a real person?

Some of the results are quite goofy and Goonish/Pythonesque. Some recent ones were:

• Eight R. Straggles
• Stratagem B. Shipyard
• Fatalist H. Faraway
• Grunt P. Foreclose
• Beards T. Lively
• Gamma F. Transfusion
• Constance V. Barrage
• Swooned H. Stimson
• Resettle D. Outrigger
• Dogcatchers G. Abbess
• Checker G. Canards
• Balminess Q. Crawl
• Threatenings L. Chortle
• Sandy L. Gasping
• Flap C. Kerouac
• Nonfiction H. Miraculously
• Shrieking P. Delano
• Superficial I. Incumbent
• Dillydallied H. Yevtushenko
• Heliport S. Persecuting
• Handgun H. Deficient
• Churlishness H. Folk
• Striker M. Vistas
• Denver G. Commonwealth
• Discotheque H. Artificer
• Appeasement E. Percolated
• Injection V. Brenda
• Projectile S. Scuzzier
• Feting U. Deleterious
• Stereo Q. Sectarianism
• Infringement R. Swampiest
• Hesiod A. Probationer

The ones in bold are the ones I like so much I’m going to try and use them in a script or even in conversation. Such as “Wasn’t that written by the poet Grunt P. Foreclose?”, or “Wasn’t he killed by the gangster Shrieking P. Delano?”.

Multi-Touch Interaction Research at their NYU home page (its downloadable there), or:

Streaming version at YouTube.

The future of computing? Maybe – It would breathe new life into the tablet PC market I bet. Especially if they can get the system to be able to determine which finger you are using at any time, so that commands/modes can be mapped to certain fingers. I can see this one day making the computer mouse look as cumbersome as punched paper cards.

UPDATE: But not everyone agrees that it is a useful technology – see the discussion on the demo here. Personally, as a Wacom tablet user/lover, the uses for this are quite obvious to me,and there will doubtless be less obvious uses and improvements over time (the computer mouse did not always have a scroll wheel).

A foldable, electric model aeroplane that can both fly around under direct remote control or fly itself guided by it’s own GPS, while filming its surroundings using two colour video cameras, all fed back to a toughened tablet-based computer.

I want one!

Note, the first image on the page, despite its size on the page, is actually a very large image and will take time to download on some connections.

Searching for Australian cities and areas seems broken, but manually dragging the map around can find some interesting (to me) locations. Such as my old school, where I live now, where I teach, my favourite Brisbane park, and, just for kicks, some pyramids. If this sort of information is available for free to the general public, what must the military and secret services have access to?

UPDATE: Please note – the link above leads to an external website. I have nothing to do with that site and I did not create the South Park Character maker flash program. I just thought it was cool, so I linked to it.
To be able to save images of your south park creation

• press the “PrtSc” key on your keyboard. This takes a screen shot of your screen and places it in memory.
• Then paste the screen shot into your favourite image editor (photoshop, Gimp, etc), or even into your favourite word processor (Word, Open Office Writer, etc).
• Then crop/trim it till you just have your character.
• Then save it to your hard drive.

There does not appear to be any built-in saving feature on the site.

1 September 2005: Link updated.

22 April 2006: Update added.

19 September 2007 : Link updated again.