14 DAY TRIAL // If you are having issues with the visibility of the display, OS X gives you the option of zooming in the entire screen, magnifying everything. You can zoom in as much as you like and the screen will automatically follow the cursor so that you can navigate around. This zooming is ideal for those situations where you need better visibility, like when reading a text. Such magnification is also useful when working at the pixel level since you can better see the individual pixels, but here it also has the disadvantage that it makes everything big and you lose the ability to see what things look like at the normal size. To compromise, you could use something like iPiece that gives you an area zoom, while still leaving the rest of your screen the way it normally looks.
What it does iPiece is a little program that gives you a floating blow-up of the area around your mouse. You can choose how big you want the area to be, as well as how big you want the magnification to be. The program is incredibly easy to work with, letting you turn it off or an as needed with just a few clicks, or using keyboard shortcuts.
Working with it iPiece will give you a little magnification floater that moves around after your mouse. Now, since the usefulness of such magnification is often quite specific, it is not something you are going to want around all of the time. Fortunately, iPiece makes it incredibly easy to toggle the magnification floater on or off. The bulk of the interaction with the program takes place through a little menu bar item. Click this twice and it will turn the floater on or off, click it once and you can see the preferences.
There are three types of setting for iPiece. The first and most important is just how much magnification you want and how big you want the area to be magnified. At this point, you run across one of the quirks this program has. Unlike other programs, where you tell them how big you want the floater to be, in iPiece you tell the program how big the original area that will be magnified should be. As such, you get what initially seems like a weird correlation between magnification and area. The application refuses to make the floater bigger than a 512X pixel square. It will also want to fit the entire original area into that square, even magnified. So if you want 2x magnification, you can only have an original area of 256, while at 4X magnification the original area can be no larger than 128. The entire system is simply messed up and if you want the bigger magnification, you will automatically have to put up with a much bigger floater.
You can change the appearance of floater, by choosing to gray out the screen everywhere except the area that will be magnified, display the boundaries of the area to be magnified when the mouse is still, and last but not least, display a cross hair. Graying out the entire screen is much more intrusive than the simple boundaries when the mouse is still and the crosshair is good for making pixel selections with minimal errors. The magnified display can also be adjusted by increasing the contrast, converting it to grayscale or simply inverting the colors.
Lastly, the program lets you turn magnification on or off, increase the size of the magnified area or increase the level of magnification, all through keyboard shortcuts. These shortcuts can be activated and deactivated at will, as well as customized.
Complicated The functionality of this program is extremely simple and has been around for ages. iPiece makes things easier by letting you activate or deactivate its functionality on the fly, but the way it handles the magnification floater itself is simply horrid.
Having everything center around the area to be magnified is a very poor choice. If you want to increase or decrease magnification, the floater will grow or shrink, if you want to increase or decrease the size of the area to be magnified, the floater will grow or shrink. This just makes no sense whatsoever, the floater should always be the same size, that you determine in the preferences. To make things even worse, when the floater starts getting big, it will magically jump about the screen as the program tries to keep it on screen. Simple things such as going from a 2X magnification to 4X are accompanied by a massive reduction in screen space and much skittering about of the floater.
Lastly, the floater's biggest flaw is the fact that it has massive anti aliasing applied, which you simply cannot disable. This makes it all but useless for pixel work since the resulting blurry display is even harder to work with than the normal small one.
The Good One of the easiest magnification programs to turn on or off and have just when you need it. Very customizable in all the right places.
The Bad The way the developer treats the area to be magnified as the main variable instead of the floater size is simply horrid. The anti aliasing that is always present in the magnification is a big problem too.
The Truth iPiece may be easy to turn on and off and perfect for just when you need it, but the way it works leaves a lot to be desired. The main functionality of the program is flawed and no other additional options or niceties will change that.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
