basically, you want a different desktop metaphor. rather than zooming in and out of conceptual space (which is what things like expose and spaces try to do) you want to zoom in and out of something resembling real space. while that would be a perfectly fine metaphor (and one that makes a lot of sense with graphics-work, where there is a natural physical relationship between parts), it's not the metaphor apple chose to use. Chacon son gout, if you'll pardon my French.

Connect that 30-inch display, which will give you 2560 x 1600 on one display, without having to scroll around.
Get a MacPro, add a 2nd video card, and connect 4 of those 30-inch for 5120 x 3200 REAL area. :D
Would the 'resolution-independence' technology that has been talked about since before Leopard was released, do what you want?
An application that provides you with scrolling through a graphic file that can be enormously larger than the application window does what you want.
The system 'zoom' feature sort-of does that, but you simply magnify the screen area, and lose sharpness very quickly.

tlarkin and deltamac,

I think the zoom feature in OS X only allows zooming into the desktop that is confined to the display capacity. On my Macbook Pro, the biggest desktop I can have is 1680x1050. The zoom feature in OS X will let you zoom into that area, but not beyond it.

What I'm looking for is an app that allows OS X to create a larger desktop area of, for instance, 4000x3000 at the Finder level, not just inside individual applications. Most publishing or photo applications already allow this to happen inside their application, by letting you set a document size in pixels or inches, but in order to see the entire document at 100%, you have to scroll around the document in the application's window. The technology is already available -- just not on an operating system-wide basis, apparently.

If anybody comes across any information that suggests an application exsits, that enhances the operating system to do this, please let me know!

I have used the zoom feature to zoom into PDFs and web browsers before so I think it works with anything you should at least try it.

EDIT

OH OK I see you want to actually make the desktop resolution physically bigger not just zoom. Took me a second to get that through my head.

Will do, but don't hold your breath. :D As mentioned by several expert users on this forum, Apple has chosen not to implement their OS this way and there is probably no chance that something out there exist for this.

Speak to the guys over at path Finder and ask them if something like this is even possible. They have an app where they use a desktop that they create so they may be able to help you.

Remember, there is always Xcode!

I am pretty sure that you can do this with an X11 window manager. I have seen something like this with fvwm2. You would have to have a rooted X11 window, I don't think that you could do it rootless.

However, if you app isn't X11, then I am not sure that this is even applicable.

Virtual desktop size is something that I have always seen with bundled with the graphics card adapter software. I had an old Matrox that did it, and my work computer with Nvidia can do it. I don't think that my ATI X800 has a virtual desktop size option, though.

Good luck,
Brett

I found on Wiki that one term for this is "Desktop Scrolling." The only example of it, however, was where the desktop scrolled left or right. Perhaps the term I'd use would be Dynamic Virtual Desktop Zooming, since instead of scrolling or switching, the action preferred would be to use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out of different areas of one large desktop.

From the last few posts it looks like you guys understand what I'm trying to explan. SUCCESS! With Apple's "Core" X stuff availability, I would think that the ability to do this with a large desktop would be easy to implement. I'm surprised it isn't available somewhere. Maybe it is and I just haven't found it yet...

As Brett mentioned earlier a lot of that stuff on the Windows side is controlled via the driver. I know that both ATI and Nvidia allow for some weird customizations with their driver control panels.

Now I am curious if there is a Mac equivalent????

It is not an option on the ATI 9200 that I have installed in my PPC tower.

Brett