I have decided to make publicly available a small program which I have written because I needed it myself and found the standard xmag utility to be thoroughly insufficient for my needs.
The extra features compared to xmag include more convenient choice of the screen part to show, possibility to resize the window (and the part being magnified), increase and decrease zoom factor in one key press and the possibility to view the grid (for easier pixel counting) and the colour of the pixel under mouse in RGB and, most importantly for me, autorefresh of the view which allows to observe changing objects on screen. The version 0.02 also adds the possibility to save the image (either zoomed or the the original one) in any of the graphics formats supported by wxWindows (including GIF/PNG/JPEG/BMP/XPM/PCX/PNM).
If I can find some time I will try to also add the following in the next version:
If you have anything else in mind don't hesitate to contact me.
Download the sources or binaries (Win32 or Linux RPM only for the latter) here.
If you download the Windows binary, you will need precompiled wxWindows DLL for Win32 which can be found in the same location. Just unzip both files into any directory (of course, you can also put wxmsw211.dll into your Windows directory) and run the executable.
For Linux, you may get the RPM containing wxWindows from wxGTK home site (you only need runtime RPM for wxZoom.rpm but development package if you want to compile it yourself).
For other systems you don't have any choice but to compile wxZoom yourself. Luckily, this is very simple: it just requires wxWindows development package to be installed, but after this building it is a matter of typing
$ ./configure $ make $ make install
After launching the program you can press the left mouse button in the window and drag it to select the screen area to view. You can increase/decrease the zoom level with Ctrl-I/Ctrl-O (also from the menu) and you can also refresh the window either manually (F5) or automatically (Ctrl-A) using a configurable interval.
Miscellaneous other features:
Please contact me with any comments/suggestions.