Ant Loupe

Designing visual elements for a computer requires more tools than programming skills and a set of applications. You might want to closely inspect all elements, case in which specialized applications like Ant Loupe come with the right means, letting you zoom in on the area under the cursor.

One of the main advantages here is portability, allowing you to carry it around on a USB flash drive without having to worry that the health status of the target PC gets affected, because no registry entries need to be modified to ensure functionality.

A compact window shows up on launch, with the core function instantly activated, which is magnification of the area under the cursor. The preview area updates almost in real time, with the possibility to adjust the refresh rate in milliseconds from the options panel.

Depending on the depth of analysis you need to perform, the application also comes with a configuration slider for the zoom level. Although value fields are not visible for accurate zoom, you can get closer, and even farther away from the screen. There are, however, a few buttons through which to return to different percentage zoom levels.

In case you want to get a better look at a specific area, there’s the possibility to stop following the cursor. Unfortunately, there’s no built-in option to save the fixed image, but this can be bypassed by hitting the print screen button.

The options menu also holds settings to change the style and color of the crosshair representing the cursor. You can choose to keep the main window on top of every other window to have the preview area constantly in sight. Coordinates of the cursor are shown in the status bar, but no color codes.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Ant Loupe is a practical alternative to the default Windows magnifier. It would have been useful to see a color picker, or at least RGB colors shown, but it comes with enough variety of options to live up to expectations overall.