Happy Twenty-Ten to ALL!  A new year has begun, and it’s high time I resumed my blogging.  I’ve posted so infrequently in recent months that I felt like a fraud when this blog made a list of the 50 Best Blogs for Special Ed Teachers in December.  I’m hoping to do at least a little better in 2010!

In October of 2007 I wrote a post about Dragnifier, a handy little utility for the PC from Ed Halley that functions very effectively as a convenient magnifying glass for the computer screen.  I’m fond of Dragnifier and just last week installed it on my dad’s computer.

Today I’m writing about Virtual Magnifying Glass, an impressive alternative to Dragnifier that is available for Mac, Linux, PC, and even Free BSD platforms.

Once installed and opened, the magnifying glass lives in the system tray, at least on a PC.  It can then be activated by a simple mouse click.  Since the icon in the system tray is rather small, there is also the helpful option of using a customizable keyboard command to activate magnification.

Virtual Magnifying Glass is remarkably customizable.  Magnification can be adjusted from 1.5x to 16x.  The lens can be set to cover as little or as much of the computer screen as desired–from 64 x 64 pixels to 1024 x 1600.  There is also a setting that allows the user to invert the colors of whatever is viewed through the lens.

Once an individual’s preferred settings have been established, it is dead easy to lock them in as the default.  When the lens is active, however, there is a set of keyboard shortcuts to make adjustments on the fly.

This is an invaluable piece of open source software.  Even if you don’t normally face vision challenges, it would be worth installing Virtual Magnifying Glass on your computer, especially if you ever project your screen to relatively large audiences.  You can use the lens to enlarge any part of your screen so that even participants in the back of the room can see what you are referring to onscreen.