Teach42

I miss my Mac.  Let me get that out of the way.  There are plenty of reasons why I like Windows too, and wouldn’t dream of trying to say that one OS is better than another, but there are certain little features built into OSX that I miss quite a bit.  Slowly but surely, I’m figuring out ways to accomplish the same sort of tricks on XP, but it just ain’t as smooth or pretty.

OS X is fantastic when it comes to screen shots.  It’s incredibly simple to take a screenshot of the entire screen, your active window, or just an area of the screen that you select.  I used that all the time while creating Power Points and handouts.  Windows by default only allows you to take screenshots of your active window or the entire screen.  I haven’t found a GOOD free way to do the selection part in XP, but I’ve invested a few bucks into a program called Snagit, which does all of that and way more.  You can have things saved to the clipboard, or to file in just about any format you could want.  It even has its own editor, pefect for adding quick little notes or arrows to screenshots before they wind up in Word, Power Point or an email.  It ain’t free, but you definitely get your money’s worth with it.

Right now I’m preparing for a full day hands on blogging session that I’m doing at the ICE conference in Illinois.  I love the way David Warlick uses the zoom feature of OSX to zoom in on web addresses that he’s typing in so everybody can see them really clearly. Quick, easy and very very smooth.  With two keystrokes, you can zoom in and keep zooming as far as you like.  So I did a quick search to see if I could find a way to do that with Windows.  Turns out you CAN do it, but it requires a few steps.

Windows includes a program called Magnify.  You can probably find it in the Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Accessibility folder.  While it doesn’t zoom the entire screen in around the mouse, it creates a zoom window docked to the top of the screen (you can move it around though) that follows your mouse around.  Using the options menu, you can choose how much of a zoom there will be.  Since there’s no keyboard shortcut for zooming in farther, it’s a little cumbersome.  It does work though.

However, you don’t really want to be roaming around menus in the middle of a presentation.  So I did a quick search to see how to add a keyboard shortcut in windows to open a program.  Once again, it isn’t exactly intuitive, but you CAN do it.  Here’s how.  The program you want to add a shortcut to has to be on your desktop or in the Start Menu.  Yeah, I know that’s weird, but deal with it.  Navigate to it and right click on the icon.  Choose Properties.  From there, you can go to the Shortcut tab and click on the line that says ’shortcut key’.  At this point, you can choose a keyboard shortcut.  I chose CTRL-SHIFT- F1 for magnify.  Now whenever I hit that key combination, magnify pops right open!  Of course, to close it, I still have to right click in the window and go to Exit.  As I said, it may not be as slick as OS X, but at least it’ll work.

Ok, next up is Expose!  Anyone know how to mimic that on XP?

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