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I'm looking for examples of interfaces where the user is shown part of the UI enlarged or magnified so they can perform a detailed task.

One example would be the magnified text on an iPhone when positioning the cursor.

(The background is that I'm working on a video timeline where the cursor needs to be positioned with greater accuracy than pixels allow, so I'm thinking some sort of magnified view might help. But examples don't need to be timeline based).

Any help or inspiration would be much appreciated.

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Don't most video editing tools allow you to zoom in on the timeline so each pixel goes from being, say, one second to being one tenth of a second? – Rahul♦ Oct 28 '10 at 12:58
Yeah, that's true, but I'm trying to find alternatives to this as it's more involved than I'd like - choosing your zoom level and then the view of the timeline changing is a quite a complicated experience. I'm trying to get a user experience of "drag to set rough position then quickly adjust in the zoomed view" rather than "drag to set rough position, choose your level of zoom, adjust, choose level to zoom out to". – edeverett Oct 28 '10 at 13:25

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2 Answers

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The SIMILE timeline widget provide a two scale timeline.

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+1 it is a nice one. – igor Oct 31 '10 at 17:38
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Does this answer your question : Speed dependant automatic zooming [Igarashi and Hinckley, 2000] ?

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It's not quite what I was looking for but it's interesting never the less. – edeverett Oct 28 '10 at 15:05
hm... «I'm trying to get a user experience of "drag to set rough position then quickly adjust in the zoomed view" rather than "drag to set rough position, choose your level of zoom, adjust, choose level to zoom out to".» It performs the same on one view... much better no ? – FabienAndre Oct 28 '10 at 15:23

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