Since discovering this feature a month ago, I am amazed at how often I use it. Increasing the text size only increases the text size, not graphics on the page. This lets me zoom in on hard to see details of a picture. My eyes aren't what they used to be and before this feature I had to use a magnifying glass I kept near my Mac. I haven't used it once since I started using this feature. Awesome stuff Apple! Thanks for being so detail orientated.

I've routinely zoomed in and out on various documents after discovering the Windows feature with scroll mouses (Ctrl + scroll wheel) several years ago. Before Tiger OS X 10.4.8, the Mac feature worked similarly as for Windows. That is, the zoom of the current document was affected. If you were looking at a Word doc, the Word zoom level would change, but NOT the whole screen. The same went for other apps with zoom features (very handy for examining spreadsheets at a glance for extraneous cells!), including browsers' text size--but not the image size. Unfortunately it didn't work with Mac Mail, but that's another topic.

Now, though, they've replaced that functionality with this method of zooming the entire screen.

I don't like this new way. I hope there's an option to let me go back to the Windows-like functionality. Thanks for explaining what happened to one of my favorite features.

Command - + or Command - - (minus) works in most programs.

Kirk

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I don't like this new way. I hope there's an option to let me go back to the Windows-like functionality. Thanks for explaining what happened to one of my favorite features.

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Nothing has changed. All Apple did was add another shortcut for it.
This zooming behavior has nothing to do with applications themselves. It has no effect on their settings. This zoom is part of accessibility which is a government requirement to help those with disabilities, visual disabilities in this case, which is why both Microsoft and Apple have this feature. The convenience for presentations, web design, etc. is a side benefit but not the main reason for being. The post from the person who used to need a magnifying glass is an example of this. Life is made easier for them.

If you notice, when you use the Universal Access zooming, the zoomed image is blurry because it is only scaling existing pixels. That is not like Excel etc. view zooming or Command +/- zooming where the image remains sharp because the actual objects are being scaled. When Apple completes implementing Resolution Independence in Leopard, we might see this type of zoom remain perfectly sharp except for those UI elements that are still bitmaps or small bitmaps. But it still remains distinct from actual scaling of objects as opposed to the screen output.