This was once one of the most amazing secrets in the world. It only worked if you had the old Apple 13-inch color monitor and a Mac II High-Resolution video card. It doesn’t work with any newer equipment.
The trick was this: You know that one-inch black band of darkness around the perimeter of your monitor? A brilliant shareware control panel, MaxAppleZoom, eliminated it. This amazing program filled every single pixel behind the glass with usable image, right up to the plastic collar. Suddenly, you’ve got a 704-by-512 pixel screen instead of 640-by-480 — as though you traded up to a monitor that’s 17 percent bigger. Alas, most people no longer have the required monitor and video card. But MaxAppleZoom is still widely available from online services.
So, if all of that screen area can be made usable just by flipping a software switch, why does Apple leave the dark border around the edges to begin with?
In previous editions of this book, we speculated, cynically, that Apple wanted to boost its sales of bigger monitors. Apple’s party line has always been, though, that if you fill a monitor’s glass with image, the electron gun can’t focus equally crisply everywhere, and the picture will go slightly blurry in the corners. Today’s multisync monitors (discussed shortly) prove Apple right; if you enlarge the screen image on an Apple Multiple Scan monitor to the edges of the glass, the picture does indeed look unfocused in the corners. (MaxAppleZoom could get away with it because it only worked on a 13-inch monitor — too small to exhibit this corner-degradation effect.)
