The Project

Biggifier
is the product of a research project conducted by three Cornell Computer Science students to implement display magnification software for the Linux platform.
The Team
Gregory Bowman
Engineering - CS - '06
Lucas Cook
Engineering - CS - '06
Christopher Huang
Engineering - CS - '06

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The Inspiration
Greg, one of the three team members, is handicapped with an eye disorder that severely reduces his sight, requiring him to use magnification software on his own PC, which runs Windows. To any CS major, encountering the Linux platform is inevitable. Therefore, in order to facilitate this, Greg needed to find magnification software for the Linux platform. Unfortunately, the search was hardpressed, forcing him to consider other options... and thus, the inspiration for this project was born.

Brief Technical Summary

Biggifier is written in C, and its magnification functionality implemented through the GTK toolkit. The software was implemented and tested in the Red Hat Linux environment. Biggifier dedicates the top portion of the screen to displaying an enlarged image of the area centered around the mouse cursor position. The image is magnified by a factor sleected by the user. Other functionalities that Biggifier provides is color inversion and image smoothing*.

* the image smoothing function has been omitted pending a more efficient implementation

Screenshot


[click to enlarge]



Source Code:

Biggifier.h
Biggifier.c

Download the complete project:
Biggifer.tar.gz (49.7 KB)


The Future of Biggifier

As with any software, Biggifier has room for improvement and expansion. Some possible future functionalities include:

- Full Screen Magnified View
- Efficient Image Smoothing
- Compatibility with other Linux environments