15-Minute Reviews :: Magnifying Glass Pro v1.4

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Magnifying Glass Pro version by Workers Collection – An on-screen magnifier application including an assortment of extras.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“The Magnifying Glass Pro utility is a virtual magnifier (virtual lens, screen-zoomer) that enables you to enlarge (magnify) text and graphics as they are displayed on your computer monitor or attached television screen, or projected onto a larger media during a presentation (e.g., using an application such as PowerPoint).

As you pass your mouse cursor over a section of the viewing area, the display is magnified making it instantly more readable and accessible. In addition, you can apply a variety of visual effects and enhancements to that display.”

Quick Pros

• Lots of options for optimal needs – Profiles handy for different settings
• Targets to auto-assign profiles or full-screen magnification to applications
• Auto-switching to monitor what application is below the mouse
• Command mode handy for quick changes to settings
• Mouse shaking handy for toggling specific settings

Quick Cons

• Anti-aliasing decreases quality quite a bit
• Shaking functionality awkward to get working at times
• CPU usage high with a lot of settings on, but managable

Expansion

While Microsoft offers a magnifier tool with Windows XP, it is very basic and not a lot of options to it. Magnifying Glass Pro offers much more than what Microsoft offers by providing fully customizable settings to the needs of those who are using this application.

First off, while the interface is rather stuffed, there is a good reason; The level of customization of this application is extremely high. For just the magnifying glass alone, there are options such as glass transparency, size, zoom factor, caret watch (Tracking your typing); Advanced options such as contrast modes and glass positioning; As well as effects such as rotation, flipping, grayscale and noise. Running my tests, I ran with some transparency, negative and glass position under cursor, and grayscale effect, providing a very clear image of what I was working on without the typical coloring of negative effects. The anti-aliasing decreases visibility in my opinion and I couldn’t see many using it who would normally use an application like this. There are plenty of other options I didn’t touch on either as well that can build on your experience. When you get the setup you like, you can save it as a profile, permitting you to quickly recall settings later, or even use with ‘targetting’ and ‘auto-switching’ which can let you customize your experience for different applications as well.

Targetting is an interesting aspect; When you have gotten your settings set up how you like them, you can set them as a profile and attach them to a specific application. With this, you could set up word processors to be more powerful with carat tracking, blow up the calculator further or much, much more. This in itself could simplify the use of the computer for those who may be visually impaired by preconfiguring their system for simplicity and reducing the amount of repetitive actions that may be needed. With targetting, there is also the feature of auto-switching; The application can watch to see what window the cursor is over and change accordingly to what window the mouse is over. This in itself can also help by automatically switching the profiles for you without having to use the system tray icon; Simplicity for long-term usage is clearly a goal of this application.

Another function of this application is the command mode. Command mode allows you to make quick on-screen changes to your settings without having to open up the main dialog box, only requiring you to hold a key combination down and move the mouse. Change the glass size, transparency level, magnification level, turn off or on the cursor enlargement and anti-aliasing as well as quick-changing profiles are offered here for quick use without requiring more than your mouse and the key combination.

One last interesting feature is the mouse-shaking functionality. You can use the simple left-to-right shake movement or up-and-down movement to perform specific toggles (customizable) such as turning on or off the glass, enabling or disabling the command mode and much more. While the shake functionality is pretty handy, I found it awkward to get it to work once in a while, even on an easier setting; I do understand that full-screen shake is the best, but I did still have issues occasionally with this working; Maybe not just one slider, but two, one for vigor of the shake, and one for tolerance for imperfections in the shake; Could even deal with a ‘wizard’ to build the settings correctly.

While I did list the CPU usage in the ‘cons’ section, it isn’t as bad as it could have been. With the settings I noted above (Which is quite a few) the CPU sits idle at about 6 percent on my test system. When moving at a natural speed, it creeps up to about 10 percent; Shaking as violently as I could (With mouse shaking off of course) I could get CPU usage all the way up to 24 percent. These numbers may seem high, but keep in mind that this application won’t be used during gaming, and during process-intensive times of the system (such as decompressing files, applying PhotoShop filters, etc.) there is likely to be a decrease in mouse movement during these actions, so the increase in CPU usage is likely to be less noticeable than you would assume. A suggestion for anyone who may be looking to use this application; Try a dual/quad-core system. This will likely decrease your noticeable amount of CPU usage due to load balancing across the cores as since most applications out there have yet to go multi-core yet, and even if they do, you’ll see less of a hit anyways.

Final Verdict

I was rather impressed in the sheer number of options in this application and the capabilities of this application; This makes Microsoft’s Magnifier look pathetic in comparison. While the CPU usage is rather high, as I mentioned there is a good chance that the alternating mouse-use/application-use will minimize the effect, and become even less apparent on multi-core. The benefits potentially outweigh this significantly. This application shows a lot of promise in the future too; There is a link right in the main dialog box asking for comments to improve the application. For free, if you need a magnifier for some purpose, this is definitely a great option to look at and worth snapping up today. As for paying $24.95, the productivity improvements that could be created for many visually impaired people could be a major benefit and in my opinion could easily be worth this price to many.

Posted by BladedThoth on Saturday, July 28, 2007