Pressing the maximize button still isn’t allowing you to view all your window content?
Most apps should remember your default window size. In Safari, IIRC, you open a new window, resize it to what you like, and close it. From then on, all new windows will retain that size.
Pressing the maximise button in firefox takes the window I guess to a predetermined size that results in a square window. I have to manually drag it to make it as wide as the screen, and the extra inch does make a difference on information heavy websites.
Yeah, and it’s not like the cells of your Excel spreadsheet or the text of your Word document somehow get larger and more legible just because you stretch the window-borders to the four edges of your screen. They don’t. Making the window “maximized” just means you surround the live parts of your document with additional white space.
Now a web browser window, that’s different (or often different at any rate). HTML and CSS are intrinsically designed to reflow the layout to take advantage of window size. OTOH, all Mac web browsers I’ve seen let you specify your desired window size via drag-and-resize ONCE and from then on will default to that size.
But seriously, in most applications if you can’t read the window contents in a window taking up 3/4 of a 12" screen, it isn’t going to get easier to read by having the window take up the whole screen.
Incidentally, I’m not whinging that having to drag the window a little is a whole lot of extra work, just that it IS extra work and I’d prefer to have the maximise button actually make the window as big as it could go.
On the other hand, if you take a word document, stretch the window as big as it goes and then increase the zoom size in the document it DOES become larger and more legible.
And if you set it to 200% and then hit the OSX zoom button, the window should accomodate the text at that increased point size — to the new margin location or to the edge of your screen, whichever comes first.
And you can right-click on the app you want in the Dock and select the actual document you’re looking for.
Hey, I learned something new about OS X today! Thanks, Yookeroo. I knew you could view the contents of a folder that you had in the dock that way, but I never thought to check apps. There’s even a little diamond next to the item in the list if that window is minimized in the dock.
I thought of another factor.
Don’t know if the discrepancy still exists (or exists to a meaningful degree) but I seem to recall that from pretty early on, Mac users were more likely to have large displays at higher resolution. Even when the Mac SE was a modern computer, people would buy a display card and attach a second monitor. In the era when the Mac was first going head-to-head against Windows (3.1) PCs, almost all PC displays were running at 640 x 480 x 8 bits, but what with desktop publishing and Photoshop and all, (not to mention that someone willing to shell out for a Mac would be more likely to shell out for a high rez monitor go to with it), typical Mac resolution was 832 x 724 with a decent smattering of 1024 x 768 and 1152 x 870 screens out there.
I do agree that Apple tends to neglect the needs of people using the smaller PowerBooks with the smallest screens, but my current PowerBook’s native display is 1680 x 1050 and I sure as hell don’t need the whole display for any application or its windows unless maybe I’m doing a slideshow of my photo images or playing a DVD or something like that!
Make that 832 x 624.
Silentgoldfish, I recently ran across this entry at 43 Folders that you might like. It’s about how to “fake” fullscreen mode in OS X using Universal Access (found in the Preferences pane). Some of the comments on the entry might be interesting for you too.
I typically have my 19" monitor set to a resolution of 1280X1024. If I full-screened my windows it would make lines of text too long and it would be difficult to jump from the end of one line to the beginning of the next when reading.