Does maximise make sense to you?

Sunnz

Sunnz

Who wants a stylus?
The Maximise button, or, if you like, the green + button, does it make sense to you?

I have been with Windows and Gnome/Xfce for a while, the Maximise button always does one thing, takes the whole screen.

But I cannot make any sense of the Apple's implementation, it seems very... unpredictable... so I end up not using it much...

Does it make sense to anyone here? If so, maybe if you could explain it how you think it works?
 
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/05/16/cocoa.html

it's been the topic of many a conversation. no-one really knows what the button is 'designed' to do, and if they do, they can't really exaplin why most porgrams don't do what you want. like most of us here, it's best to ignore that button.

it's one of those things, like the inconsistency of the finder that really irritate the select few who have time to let it bother them. nothing's perfect, i suppose...
 
It makes a lot of sense...when it's implemented sensibly. Unfortunately, the Finder's implementation is riddled with bugs, so if you've been trying to make sense of it in the Finder, boy do I feel your frustration. In the Finder, it's basically worthless, IMHO. It's one of many reasons I miss OS 9's Finder.

The maximize button is supposed to resize the window to its largest "reasonable" size. This usually means "just big enough to display all the content". If it's already that size, then it will go back to the last user-specified size, so you can use it to toggle between sizes like that.
 
The Finder in OS 9 would actually take up the entire screen (although you could still resize it, unlike WIndows or Gnome/KDE/XFCE where you would have to restore the window before you can resize it). If you hold down Option and then hit the maximize button in OS 9, any application's window would take up the whole screen. Even Mac OS versions before OS 9 supported this (I don't know how early this feature was supported....I know that it works down to System 7 in my experience).

I kind of have mixed feeling about it, though. I use it in Windows and Linux, but it does become a hinderance at times, like when I want to copy a link directly from the location bar of Firefox to the desktop. Sure I could just save the page through the menubar, sure I could restore the window and then drag it over, but those are extra steps that slow me down.

At the same time, the inconsistency in Mac OS X is just as bad. Usually in the Mac OS X Finder, the window only maximizes to the optimal size that it needs to be. This is why Safari doesn't maximize all the way like in Windows/Gnome/KDE/etc.....it maximizes to the optimal size of the website's design. OF course, not all applications function like this. Firefox and Camino are two good examples of this. Camino does take up the whole screen without covering the Dock (leaving a small space of the desktop on the bottom right and left if your Dock is at the bottom) while Firefox takes up about 75% of the screen, leaving a space on the right enough to show the icons on the desktop. While I do prefer Firefox's method of maximization, the fact that all of these applications are inconsistent in how they maximize is something that has driven me crazy since I have moved to OS X. Most of it is the fault of the developers but Apple is also to blame, especially since I never remembered such inconsistency problems cropping up in OS 9 and below.
 
nixgeek said:
If you hold down Option and then hit the maximize button in OS 9, any application's window would take up the whole screen. Even Mac OS versions before OS 9 supported this (I don't know how early this feature was supported....I know that it works down to System 7 in my experience).
Click to expand...
In OS X, holding down Option while using any of the three window buttons will apply that action to all open windows of the application. Classic Mac OSes did this with closing and windowshading, too. I use option-close-box often, but I can't imagine wanting to maximize a bunch of windows at once.
 
Mikuro said:
In OS X, holding down Option while using any of the three window buttons will apply that action to all open windows of the application. Classic Mac OSes did this with closing and windowshading, too. I use option-close-box often, but I can't imagine wanting to maximize a bunch of windows at once.
Click to expand...

Yes, I've used the Option-Close-button as well on both Classic (for many years now) and X, although I wasn't aware that it would maximize all of the windows for that application in OS X.
 
well, in my experience the green + button behaviour is pretty consistent and predictable...with some exceptions.

usually, all it does is toggling between two states:
1) the last (user-specified) window-state and 2) some system/app defined optimal setting.

this last-/user-specified setting (1) is set whenever a window first opens or when you move or resize a window.
the 'optimal' setting (2) is controlled by the OS and/or the developer.
if she (the dev) doesn't respond to the clicking-the-green-button-event, the action defaults to trying to go as fullscreen as possible, or to the biggest size possible for that window. and back to the previous state when clicked again.

this 'optimal' setting is indeed not always very transparant, and certainly doesn't always mean 'fullscreen'.
as mentioned above, the Finder for instance will just resize and relocate a window to optimally fit it's content and display on screen, which usually is not fullscreen. i use the green button for exactly this reason all the time.

clicking the button again will usually toggle the window back to it's original state, although there seems to be some kind of algorithm behind the mechanism to prevent user-unfriendly window layouts.
i admit that this sometimes also makes me too wonder...

the event of clicking the green + button is something developers can capture and react-on in their software, and the implementation in different software varies.
i understand people may considered this as inconsistent, but i think if you're aware of that, it's not. it's part of the behaviour of an app. each app has it's own real estate requirements..

generally it's a feature i use all the time, and i just got used to it's behaviour...much in the same way how i also don't exactly understand how most people around me exactly function ..:)



BTW:
nixgeek said:
Yes, I've used the Option-Close-button ... although I wasn't aware that it would maximize all of the windows for that application in OS X.
Click to expand...
..as mikuro wrote, the option key makes the zoom-action be performed on -ALL- windows of a certain app, but that is also true for the other buttons (close and minimize). and it becomes even more interesting when you also hold the shift-key to make that all happen in slowmotion...
...and it becomes even more interesting when you then also kill the dock while this all takes place... (hihi)

check this:
http://www.arri.nl/gui_fuck.mov


--------
- if the stream doesn't work, make sure to have qt-transport settings in qt-system-prefs set to http
- credits for hacking coregraphics : http://www.atzenbeck.de/research/wildWindows/ and others
- and http://usemedia.com/ for the rotating duck
 
In excel for mac the green button enlarges the workbook screen to its fullest while still leaving all buttons and window resize corner visible. Toggles between that state and whatever state the window was in before.

Other programs handle this differently, though. I agree with the previous poster.

More on why the "green button sux" here:
http://forums.macnn.com/84/mac-os-x-archives/26834/the-green-button-sucks/

Says the button is a zoom to fit, as opposed to the pc's maximize to entire screen.
 
There are some good points in that^ page, but...

What if you do want to do one thing at a time? I always "maximise" my browser as I don't read web sites and watch movies and writing documents at the same time.

I usually do stuff in the background anyway, e.g. exporting a movie while surfing the web... don't need screen estate for that.

And after-all, we've got Expose!!! Who needs spaces when you can just hit f9/10 and see all the windows? That's exactly what I do when coding btw.
 
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