Or is there and I’m missing it?
You know the button in windows that makes the window fill as much of the screen as it can, excluding the taskbar? Why is it on a mac there’s no equivalent and to make the window big I have to manually drag it that way? If I hit the green button up top it doesn’t fill the screen, it just gets bigger, but not wide enough.
It seems an odd ommission in an otherwise elegant OS.
I have no cite, but I’ve always understood it to be just part of Apple’s long-standing design philosophy. Many interactions in Mac OS (X and Classic as well) depend on dragging items from one place to another - moreso than in Windows*. The result is that Mac users generally don’t like windows that hog up the entire screen - they hide potential dragging targets. I know personally I never could tolerate the Windows “windows within a big grey application window” paradigm.
In Mac OS 9 and previous, the equivalent window-sizing button made the window just large enough to display its contents. These days, the green “plus” button’s behaviour is unfortunately somewhat unpredictable. It all depends on what the developer decides is appropriate. Apple Mail’s green button does in fact fill the screen, while iChat and Safari’s buttons leave the horizontal size the same but grows the window vertically as much as possible. Meanwhile iTunes’ green button toggles between a full and mini window.
My main complaint about the way OSX works is that you can’t easily use the scroll bar unless it’s right against the right side of the screen. I have to move the window to the right side myself each time. That way I can just flick the mouse all the way right. It’s a pain to set up the window that way and it’s always a little off, so it doesn’t look good.
It might be nice if it rotated through fullscreen, big enough to hold the document, and some arbitrary user-set size. Certainly things like a web browser should be maximized.
Amen. The damn thing is too narrow.
Really? Huh. I don’t have any trouble scrolling in a window that’s not all the way to the right; in fact, I often have windows arranged to the left and right on my screen. I do use TinkerTool though to get both scroll arrows displayed at the top and bottom of the scroll bar, because I’m lazy about wanting to move the cursor to scroll. 
Like drewbert, I hate the apps that consume all window real estate the way Windows apps do. It’s not so much for the drag and drop in my case as it is cut and paste, or just the simple need to describe in text some image or result in another app. I’ll add that apps that automatically fill the screen can be a nuisance if you have a hidden dock that pops out when your cursor gets close to the edge, or if you have any of your hot corners activated.
That seems like a design flaw (Finally! A desing flaw in the Mac OS!) If a window takes up the whole screen, then areas of the screen that are programmed to do something for another program should not function in the “full-screen” program. Though I guess that since a Mac window isn’t so much “full-screen” as it is “the size of the screen” it’s a different case than Windows where making a window full screen is an actual action and has crap associated with it. As an exmaple, there are program that you can get for Windows that put “stuff” on your dekstop, like a calender, or notes and such. If there are no windows over that area, you can often mouse over it to do something. However, if I window is over it, then that window is active, not the desktop, so the mouse over function is inhibited. (Unless you move the application window over it, but then click somewhere else on the dekstop and make the desktop active again instead of that window, but I assume you were talking about moving the mouse in the active window but still having junk from non-active windows take effect.)
Still, I would say that most of the time I want a window full screen, because more often than not I’m just browsing the ol’ internet, and most webpages are easier to read if your window is max size. However, if I am playing videos or something else, then my windows are small. For instance, I often have a video playing in the top right corner, an IM window in the bottom right/middle, and a mindsweeper or solitare game in the bottom left. And I often will still always have Firefox maxxed out and just out ther other windows on top of it.
I could never see the appeal of programs that hog the entire screen. A lot of times, I want to be working on one thing, but have the other programs’ windows visible so I can keep an eye on them.
Put me down as another person who has never seen a reason why an application window need occupy the whole damn screen.
(Exception: if you’ve got enough data to actually occupy that much space, the zoom button will zoom it to the edges of the screen)
Next thing you know, these new switchers will be begging for one of those bloody application windows to contain the document windows within a window, so they won’t accidentally get all confused if they see windows from another app in another part of the screen 
:smack:
http://home.earthlink.net/~ahunter/Upload_Download/Mac_noMDI.jpg
http://home.earthlink.net/~ahunter/Upload_Download/WIN_MDI.jpg
Productivity site 43 Folders just posted a full-screen workaround today:
http://www.43folders.com/2006/04/17/fsm2-electric-boogaloo/
That’s why I have two monitors, and disable anything that pops up anywhere at all. If I want to move things, by drag & drop, I want to see the origin and destination. Easy to do when it’s all full-screen.
Hmmm, this is something that I’ve always hated about Mac’s, but I can see that the standard Mac line is to play it off as a “benefit.”
Sure, if you’ve got three monitors lined up or a massive 40" cinema display, no problem, make overlapping windows. But for reality where half of us are working on 12 or 14" laptop screens, screen real estate is a valuable commodity. In Windows, everything is laid out in large, easy to use buttons. When I want to switch from one task to another I just look at the bottom of the screen and click on the button of the program I want to use. For Mac I have to hunt around for the damn window, resize it to where I want it, shuffle awkwardly between windows, and it slows me down a lot if I’m trying to work on more than one thing. Also, figuring out if a program is open or not is a pain in the ass, again rather than looking in one place I have to hunt through a dozen similar looking buttons in the dock and look for a little arrow or size differences or whatever. Again a total pain that the X-inati play off as a “feature.”
Oookay, just keep drinking the Kool-aid, kids.
It’s been a Mac feature since System 6 with MultiFinder. Which was on a 9 inch screen at 72 DPI (i.e., 512 x 342). The purpose of not having your app take up your whole bleeping screen is so you can do more than one thing at once.
Heck, even at the Mac’s debut in 1984, it was assumed that you would probably want to reserve part of your screen for something other than the frontmost app. From the '84 stockholder’s meeting / intro of the Macintosh
I believe most Mac folks do the same thing: they go to the Dock to switch from one task to another. What’s that got to do with looking at one while you’re working in another? What if you want to have a web site and a Quark document on-screen to read from or refer to while you’re composing your email to your boss?
My random disjointed thoughts that don’t mean anything.
MS has been very slow to get into true multiprocessing. Amazingly, astonishingly slow. The mindset has been run one app at a time. So Apple tries to highlight that their mindset has been run several apps at a time. So their GUIs have reflected this.
But still. Come on. If the user wants The Feature, give the user The Feature. Arguing that “Oh, that’s old fashioned, you should really be doing it this way…” is nonsense. It’s as bad as the one button mouse mentality.
Fair enough, ftg — as an optional behavior you set in a Preference pane, so those of us who don’t want that behavior aren’t stuck with it.
(I’m still dubious about the damn sticky menus myself, I am not able to tolerate the Dock or the Command-Tab app switching, and I most assuredly do not want the menus to move to the tops of the windows. I do like a right mouse button though, give Microsoft full credit for the right-click contextual menu)
Are you kidding me? This is absolutely the only set of features/workarounds that make OSX tolerable.
I kid you not. I run happily Dockless and Command-Tab is reserved for FileMaker Pro, for moving to the next record (or the next layout in Layout Mode).
Yeah, the Dock is not nearly as handy as the Windows taskbar; however, using 3rd-party apps to help manage your running programs makes working with OS X a lot easier. I use them on my 10.4 server and client. Here are two free ones:
I liked using ASM (another 3rd party program, except shareware), but I’d rather have the utilities free when I can manage it.
Like someone said earlier: because Mac OS has always been window-centric, while Windows has always been program-centric. Apple’s philosophy behind their design is that most of the time, you want to be able to see several windows at the same time and to be able to click through to any one of them.
If you change a window to full-size when you first open it, most programs will make that the default when you open a new window. The Finder sticks with the last change you made to the window states when you open a particular location. I will admit that I wish the behavior was more consistent. Pre-OS X, the behavior was rock-solid consistent. Now, it depends a bit on the program. Most of the time it makes sense, though.
Using the Windows taskbar is not anywhere near as friendly to me as the dock is. I intensely dislike the way the taskbar in Windows groups things, and they way it truncates labels when you have several things running. I have to click through or hover on a few buttons before I can find the one I’m looking for because there’s nothing to tell me which of several buttons it is. I also don’t like having to go to the bottom of the screen to get to the task bar to get to another window. Directly clicking on a window I can see behind my current one is a lot faster than going to the bottom of the screen every time. If I don’t want to manually resize every window instead of maximizing, I have to accept that Windows will take away the option to have multiple windows accessible.
I like that clicking the green button sizes the window to whatever it contains. In contrast to the taskbar’s weird grouping and truncated text, the dock has miniaturized versions of the window as it actually appears, giving you a clue as to what it is even before you get to the hover-text. I like being able to see at a glance what window I’m going to open. Expose by itself, or in combination with the command-tab, lets me find whatever open window I’m looking for very quickly. That’s assuming I don’t just have the windows overlapping so that I can just click on one to bring it forward. I usually run with several program windows open at once, with sometimes dozens of others lined up in the dock.
threemae, you can stuff your Koolaid comments. There must be some reason you’re using OS X in the first place. If you don’t like the way OS X works, there are mods out there that might make things nicer for you. Or you can stick to Windows. Complaining about they way something works is fine, but different people prefer to work in different ways, and you shouldn’t imply that they are deluded for preferring that method. Some people really like Apple’s software design, and the fact that they have interface guidelines while Microsoft, to my knowledge, does not, might tell you something about how much those two companies consider the end-user in designing their products.
I can understand that you might not like the way it works, but I don’t like the way Windows works a lot of the time either. Windows drives me nuts when every single app wants to fill the whole screen. It feels claustrophobic and often gets in the way when I want to be able to see a few different windows at the same time. I currently use both Windows XP and OS X, but I really prefer OS X for almost everything.
Always remember kids: people who work differently from you only pretend to like working that way. In reality, they’re just being stubborn and pig-headed.
threemae, there are many of us who really do prefer the Mac way of doing things. If something is implemented differently on the Mac than on Windows, it actually is a feature. Instead of making trollish comments, maybe you should learn how to use Exposé.
Why do I want it full screen? Because as threemae touched on, I’m on a 12 inch laptop. I’ve got limited real estate! If I want multiple windows open on the screen I can’t read any of the text in them!
