ZoomOut on OS X
UPDATE: I’m happy to report that the Zoom + Screen Sharing issue has been resolved in Snow Leopard. The remote Mac will now zoom out when using the normal keyboard commands.
Using the built-in zoom and screen sharing capabilities (or any VNC) together on OS X can be a real pain in the posterior. If you leave your screen zoomed it becomes virtually unusable via screen sharing or VNC. That’s because there is no way to effectively move the cursor (and therefore the screen position) or turn off zoom (since you can’t easily access System Preferences, and the keyboard shortcut isn’t applied to the remote machine).
As someone who uses zoom quite extensively, I often find myself trudging up flights of stairs to manually zoom out one computer so I can access it from another. Its pretty counter-intuitive. I would have though Apple to make zoom usable remotely, make it easy to shut off or just disable it when the Mac is being controlled remotely.
But no, there was no solution. So I found one myself. I put together a cute little AppleScript and packaged it up as an Application. It executes the keyboard command to zoom all the way out, re-enabling your Mac for remote use.
It can be used in a number of ways.
- Put in your dock for a painful, yet possible, launch.
- Executed via SSH in Terminal (I’ll explain in a follow up post)
- Soon using a companion app on your local Mac (this will do the SSHing for you)
So here’s the app. It is an AppleScript that zooms out your screen. That’s it, it zooms right out and quits. As usual, released under the Creative Commons license (with no warranty).
ZoomOut.app (182.2 KiB, 224 hits)
I know this of limited utility even to a small group of people, but it was irritating enough to me I though I would share. Tell me if this turns out useful for you.
This thing rocks my world!
I’ve been looking high and low, near and far for this and I finally found just what I was looking for.
Rock on Man!
Thanks! I needed to check something on my computer at home and it was zoomed in… and turning off the zoom without the ability to control the mouse was awful. I managed to copy ZoomOut over to that computer and run it through the terminal. Of course the remote computer popped up the “This application was downloaded over the internet” box which took me like 5 minutes to click. But I managed to do it and it worked.