Magnifica

Magnifica is a magnifier app I built because sometimes text is tiny, labels are impossible to read, and product designers apparently enjoy using microscopic fonts.

The name is a little bilingual joke, born of a glorious act of linguistic optimism. I'm Spanish, and "Magnifica" sounds a bit like "magnify" in English. At the same time it brings to mind magnífica in Spanish, which means "magnificent." So the goal was obvious: build a magnifier app that's, well... magnificent.

WHAT IT DOES

• Magnifies stuff. The tiny print on a medicine box, the impossible serial number on a router, the ingredients list written by someone who clearly hates you — or that suspicious little dot on your kid's leg that you really, really need to know is a freckle and not a tick. Point, zoom, see.

• Sensible zoom. It steps in powers of two (1x, 2x, 4x, 8x…) and tops out at whatever your camera can actually do. Tap plus and minus, no fiddly pinching.

• Tap to focus. See a blurry thing, tap it, it becomes a readable thing.

• A torch. On the back camera it's your real flashlight. The front camera has no flash, so it turns the whole screen blindingly white and calls that a "flash." It's a hack. It works.

• Front and back cameras, one button to flip between them.

• Negative mode. Invert the colors with one tap — handy for low-contrast or light-on-dark text. The button even previews what you're about to switch to.

WHAT IT DOESN'T DO

No accounts. No ads. No mysterious permissions. It wants the camera, because it's a camera app, and then it would like to be left alone to do its job.

Magnifica: a magnificent way to make small things bigger.

Licensed under GPL-3.0-only, by juanitobananas.