Here’s a simple Thursday timesaver for all the iTunes users. (Do we have any of those in the audience today? Ah, thought so.) When you’re watching a movie, TV show, or video podcast in iTunes, you’re probably already aware you can resize the window by using the View menu—you can choose between half size, actual size, double size, fit to screen, and full screen modes. Each of these options has an associated keyboard shortcut, making it really simple to change the view size.
But, just in case you’re a mouse user more than a keyboard user, here’s one additional method of changing the size of the video: control-click on the video itself, and you’ll see a pop-up menu listing the various size options. As I said, a simple timesaver, but one that you might not have noticed in your explorations of iTunes.
By the way, there’s one additional entry on the pop-up menu that’s not in any of the normal iTunes’ menus: Set Poster Frame. This might be very useful…if it worked. But it doesn’t, at least not that I can tell. What I think it should do is set the frame of the video that you see when you browse the movie in the iTunes interface. If you use QuickTime Player, for example, to set the poster frame of a given movie, then that selected frame is the one you’ll see in the Finder when you browse the folder containing the movie. In iTunes, though, I can’t see that setting the poster frame has any impact on anything. So for now, that appears to be a useless contextual menu entry—unless someone can prove me wrong and show that it does work in some way I haven’t yet discovered.