Free Screen Magnifier Software

This isn’t where I usu­al­ly get geeky, but I think this util­i­ty might be use­ful to many readers.

I get notices from the Give­away of the Day and Game Give­away Of the Day sites each day as to what they have avail­able that day. They make arrange­ments with var­i­ous soft­ware pub­lish­ers to dis­trib­ute com­mer­cial soft­ware absolute­ly free in return for adver­tis­ing. The catch is that the soft­ware must be down­loaded and installed with­in the 24-hour peri­od of the giveaway.

I’ve been watch­ing the site for a year or so, and have down­loaded and tried quite a few pieces of soft­ware. I’ve nev­er found any mal­ware in any of them, although I believe I’ve read men­tion of peo­ple get­ting unwant­ed soft­ware installed in a bun­dle because they did­n’t pay enough atten­tion to what they were agree­ing to dur­ing an install.

Get­ting back to my point, today’s give­away is a nifty util­i­ty that will mag­ni­fy a por­tion of your com­put­er’s screen, enabling you to bet­ter make out tiny print or small details. I did­n’t have one of these installed on my machine until about nine months ago, and I would­n’t want to live with­out it now. There is a free util­i­ty built into Win­dows, but it isn’t quite as robust as some of the oth­er prod­ucts on the mar­ket. The descrip­tion for this one says:

Mag­ic Lens Max is a real-time, intu­itive and advanced screen mag­ni­fi­er and desk­top view­er to zoom, rotate, enhance, view, and cap­ture any area of the screen dis­play. With built-in high­ly opti­mized resam­pling and enhanc­ing fil­ters, Mag­ic Lens Max quick­ly gen­er­ates a high-qual­i­ty lens views with clar­i­ty in var­i­ous sit­u­a­tions. It also lets you view in dif­fer­ent col­or modes or through sep­a­rat­ed col­or channels.

As I type this, there are anoth­er 22 hours and 55 min­utes left to down­load and install Mag­ic Lens Max. Why not give it a whirl?

(Yes, it’s a Win­dows app. Aren’t we the only ones who need such crutches?)

Oh—while I don’t find today’s free game offer­ing ter­ri­bly inter­est­ing, I have found some of the games to be very use­ful dis­trac­tions on days that involve too much pain to do any­thing and I can’t focus well enough to read. Pop­ping bub­bles or what­ev­er is a per­fect­ly mind­less pur­suit, and very con­ducive to zon­ing out and get­ting my head away from the pain for a bit. I don’t do “twitch” games, or any­thing that requires a lot of dex­ter­i­ty or is com­plete­ly tied to speed. If I was that dex­trous and/or fast, I’d be doing some­thing more use­ful than play­ing com­put­er games.