Safari remembers the size it was the last time you ran it. Hitting the green + button at this point will, in fact, make it as tall as the screen and as wide as the current content (or page-wide if the content has no width). Or…fix it once and quit, and it will be your favorite size thereafter.
Also, for all of you “other windows are distracting” folks…Command+option+h hides all the applications except the one you’re currently working in. (it’s the “Hide others” on the application menu, too).
The ONLY thing I miss on my Macbook is spider solitaire and hearts. Other than that, I find my Mac superior to any Windows stuff. Well, except Word–love Word…
To each his own. I do get tired of people expecting 2 very different systems to somehow work the same.
For some reason my Safari windows seem random, usually they stay the size I set, but not always. Not sure why. But to be fair, my Windows machine does that too, it’s just a little more streamlined to get them back to where they were. The green button is certainly workable, but (at least while browsing), since websites are not uniform, you’ll have to press it several times.
Now, this may be a stupid question, but what in the world is the function of that green button? In Safari it enlarges the window, but in iTunes it brings up the mini-player.
What would be wrong with having a configuration (in System Preferences on Mac and in Control Panel in Windows) that allows users to pick the desired behavior of the maximize button (take up the whole screen or just-large-enough-to-fit-contents)?
That would make it easier for people switching from one platform to the other (and I assume Apple, with I think 8% market share would want to make switching as painless as possible)
Besides, the best way to maximize depends on the screen size. If the screen is small, like my Macboon pro, I want the Windows way of maximizing. If the screen is large, eg the 27" screen mentioned above, I want the Mac way of maximizing.
Would it somehow hurt the “Apple philosophy of how the GUI must be” if the maximize button behavior were configurable? Or the location of the three button on top of each window were configurable? It would still be a Mac, with all of the visual candy and the stability and speed of handling multimedia. The location and behavior of the maximize button has nothing to do with what makes a Mac superior to Windows.
More accurately than my previous statement, Safari remembers the size of the last window you closed…sometimes that will be a popup or overlay or somesuch, at which point you’ll have to reset the size.
The green button toggles between the “user state” (last size you made it), and the “zoomed state” (smallest size that shows the full content of the document). In apps where there’s not a really meaningful user state (like iTunes), they just use it as a toggle between two different sizes.
Now that is the clearest explanation of the green button anyone has given me. Thanks!
No, I was trying for humour with a grain of truth. It may not have struck you as funny, in which case, sorry. It has been my experience in my many sessions of One to One with the nice folks at the Apple store, that there is always a side helping of snarky comments about Windows mixed in with the advice. When the advice is not always helpful, the snark is particularly unwelcome. Your experiences may vary.
I’m happy if it has worked out for you. I find it produces unnecessarily large files that have extremely poor sound quality, and my visits to Apple Genii haven’t helped. I don’t even use it for study tracks anymore - my friend’s Zoom 4 is infinitely superior, in my opinion.
AHunter3, Fuzzy Dunlop - I never used to get the nanny messages in Windows because I had clicked the switch deep in the Control Panel to turn them off. If the equivalent switch exists in Mac OS, I haven’t found it. I guess I wasn’t clear earlier - I understand, an operating system or a program has its defaults - it’s the fact that I can’t change those defaults when I want to that ticks me off.
I’m not as anti-Mac as I must have sounded - I’m about to buy an iMac desktop for the kids, for one thing. I just found the difference between the propaganda (both from the people at the store and friends who are Mac users) and the reality disappointing. I’m still waiting for my ideal computer; in the meantime, I muddle on.
That’s about my only complaint after going Mac - file management. I’ve been a secretarial-type for 14 years now - I know how to organize a hard drive, but Mac doesn’t like letting me put my files where I want them. I think the most frustrated I’ve been with my Mac is trying to figure out my iPhoto files (they still aren’t the way I want them - I’m just ignoring the mess the Mac OS makes of them at this point).
However, Exposé goes a long way to make up for that. I’m always hitting the middle mouse button to see what’s open and change applications in Windows (and it doesn’t do anything!).
iPhoto is a digital asset management system. These types of systems are not file system based; they’re metadata based. That’s how professional graphic types work these days and so that’s why Apple does it this way. If you prefer to work in the file system, there are probably better applications to use. Different strokes.
BTW, with most of these issues, it is a matter of preference, and/or a matter of what one is used to, but with some things, the Mac really is lacking. One of them is mentioned in the OP, namely:
You can’t resize a window by clicking on any edge of the window, only from the lower-right corner
This is quite unfortunate, since it means that if a window is justified to the right of the screen, and you need to keep it right-justified but increase its width, you need to move it left, then enlarge it, which is pretty lame.
In Windows, you just click on the left edge and drag it until you are satisfied with the new width.
Why doesn’t Windows do that? It would be trivial to add that as an configuration option in Control Panel, and it would help all the Mac people who are forced to use PCs.
Doesn’t having all these programs open take up resources? RAM, CPU?
Does the Mac have a way of handling a ton of open programs, all with no windows open, so that it doesn’t adversely affect the performance of the couple of programs that actually do have windows open and you are working on?
Should I just never quit any program on my Mac, just close any windows I am not using and not worry about programs continuing to run?
But when you add new media you usually get the auto-play popup asking if you want to open the disc, play the disc with media player, etc…I don’t see how this is much different from an icon on the desktop.
People want their desktop icon, damnit! 
A funny thing happened several years ago when my wife, then a grad student, gave a floppy disk to some undergrads, who had to use it to plot some data that was on it. It was a PC floppy disk. The next day, she asked them if they had plotted the data and they said “No”. She asked why. They said “We put the floppy in the PC and nothing happened. So we couldn’t do anything”. When she later told me the story, we were thinking “What did they mean ‘Nothing happened’? What did they expect to happen when you insert a floppy disk?” It was only later that we figured that these undergrads were Mac people, and they expected the icon for the floppy disk to show up on the desktop after they inserted it. Since no icon appeared, they assumed something was wrong and the PC couldn’t read the floppy disk.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about, here. When I double-click on a word, just that word gets selected. Are you having a different experience?
Polerius–sure, it’d be great. But why not have Windows more amenable and add Mac features? One way companies differentiate their products (and advertize) is via the differences aka “superior features” their products possess. Computers are just one example. If you want a truly unsafe example, look at infant car seats.
IOW, it ain’t gonna happen, unless one system beats out another like VHS did Beta back in the day. Just sayin’.
I think he’s referring to the way Windows will select both the word and any space that might be to the right of it. The only time it selects only the word itself is when it’s followed immediately by a punctuation mark. If I double-click the word “punctuation” for example, it will select "punctuation " with the adjacent space, yet if I double-click “space” it selects only “space” and not the adjacent comma. It is kind of stupid, really, and I can’t think of an instance where I’d want to select the space, let alone often enough that it’s default behaviour, but I’m used to it.
One thing that does kind of bug me is how slow Windows is to respond to new USB hardware being plugged in. When I switch my KVM over to the Mac, the keyboard and mouse work almost instantaneously, but when I switch it back to the Windows machine it takes a good 5-7 seconds to recognize and reactivate the mouse and keyboard.
OS X is pretty smart about handling RAM. Each running program consumes a small amount of RAM that is no longer available from the memory pool (it’s “wired” memory). If a program is running but inactive, all of it’s “unwired” memory will get paged out to disk, and become available for other programs to use. This means that on machines with a reasonable amount of RAM (2G+), it’s not really necessary to quit programs to reclaim RAM. On the system I’m posting from, I have Safari, Mail, Address Book, iCal, Excel, Wallet, and Activity monitor running (and all the zillions of OS programs). I have a total of 4.5G of which 1.6 GB is unused, .6G is inactive (claimed by another program, but not being used, so available for re-use), 1.8G in use, and only .4G Wired. So only 10% of the total RAM is completely unavailable for re-use. This 10% is the only RAM that you would “get back” if you quit a program (and remember, in this case, that 10% is divided among all the running programs).
Macs have always been this way. They are very good at handling multiple programs. I never quit anything. If I go a week or two without shutting down, I will have an enormous number of programs open. I currently have 14 programs open. That is generally what Mac users do.
In fact, in newer versions of OS X, they’ve extended this benefit to ex-Windows users who pathologically close routine programs they’re not using at the moment. When you quit a program, it’s memory pages are kept in memory until something else needs it. If you close a program, do something else for a while (that doesn’t use a lot of memory), then re-open the original program, it will open much faster than it would from a cold start, since it’s already completely or mostly loaded into memory. (You can see this in /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor – it shows as 'blue" on the memory pie chart).