robburke.NET

Barry‘s teaching a course this week and noticed that NLarge didn’t support multimon – or rather, it always zoomed in on the primary monitor. So NLarge got another update. Good thing I don’t sleep!

Changelist:

• Added Multimonitor support – zooms in on the monitor currently containing the mouse pointer.
• Added Text support – annotate zoomed-in images with text by using the ‘T’ key

[Update 5 Apr:]

• v1.1.3 – Fixed a bug in the multimonitor support that caused strange behavior after Hibernate/Restore

Download the update here on Codeplex.

I immediately wanted to update NLarge again because its new default hotkeys (Ctrl-1 for Zoom, Ctrl-2 to Draw, Ctrl-3 for Break Timer) conflict with Outlook 2007′s hotkeys for Inbox, Calendar, and Contacts.

So NLarge v1.1.1 is out.

Changelist:

• Added ability to select your own hotkeys for zoom, draw and countdown timer.
• Added ability to Alt-Tab away from break timer, and Alt-Tab back
• Added ability to press ‘w’ while zoomed in to clear canvas for drawing.
• Added a little opacity fade before and after zooms to remove glitching (and for effect).
• Automatic smoothing of lines sketched on the canvas.

NLarge is the screen magnification and annotation utility that I use for technical presentations. It magnifies the screen through a smooth animation, and allows you to pan and zoom around the magnified screen. You can annotate the magnified image using the mouse or a Tablet PC pen.
Today I added a few features to NLarge to respond to feature requests, and released version 1.1.

Here are the updated features:

• Removed glitching from start of zoom (hooray!)
• Added ability to change drawing pen colour and width
• Added a countdown timer
• Changed hotkeys from using Alt to Control to avoid conflict with Office 2007 default hotkeys
• Moved settings from the registry to a Settings file
• Updated solution to Visual Studio 2008 (leaving target .NET framework at 3.0)

NLarge is available for download from CodePlex. The code is all available there as well.

I noticed that since I last updated NLarge, its inspiration, ZoomIt, has been updated to provide a smoother zoom-in animation. However, ZoomIt still lacks NLarge’s smooth zoom-out animations, which is a shame, because I find the snap-out jarring and potentially disruptive.  I believe NLarge adds to the professionalism of my presentations by not potentially losing the context of what I’m presenting before or after I draw the audience’s attention to something via a zoom.

If ZoomIt could just zoom smoothly in and out, I’d retire NLarge, but for now, I hope you enjoy v1.1.