SuperTyphoon said:
Those are some lame excuses for not having full screen.
First of all, if you wanted to drag and drop files easily in Windows, you just shrink the windows to fit your needs. How much of your time on the computer is dragging files into another window unless you deal with tons of photos? What if you want to view a bunch of photos in one window, but you had to take the time to make it fit the most screen, and then it doesn't even take up the whole screen? The big button (as opposed to the small and hard to click on mac buttons) in the top lets you do ALL of that with a single click.
When you are on the internet or using large software, full screen is very neccessary. Mac software doesn't do that, and i feel that i can't use all of my screen real estate wisely. After all, why would they keep making bigger monitors? It's because people (unlike you) like full screen.
Lame to you, but for others it's quite the opposite. They would probably consider it lame to always have the application take up the screen if there were no necessary reason for it to do so.
As for the fullscreen, it's not Apple's fault, but the fault of the developer if they don't implement it. Again, the usefulness of this depends on the application. If it's an app that doesn't benefit from this, especially if it's a graphics manipulation program where you might find yourself dragging and dropping the pieces you've created from one app to another, why bother implementing it. Fine, they can give you the choice, but it seems futile even for the developer to include something that might not see much use since it's probably going to impede the users productivity.
The solution for
minimizing that you have given isn't a good one. That's only useful if you want to copy something to the desktop. What about from one app to another? The Windows way is to drag the component to the taskbar button of the application you want to place that compoment in and hover over it for a few seconds without letting go. Then after a few seconds the destination app window comes up and you can place it in. This takes a total of 10 seconds at most. Not quite "on-the-fly" as the drag-and-drop in the Mac. Also, if you were to even copy the file to the desktop if the app is fullscreen, you would have to somehow do that while dragging the component or file, which is impossible since you have to minimize the app first. But if you minimize it first, then you can't drag the file. Catch 22? OK, you can use keyboard shortcuts, but then that can become cumbersome as well.
BS. Just because you don't need full screen doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to have it at all. Believe it or not, there are many tiems where full screen is preferable to a small window. Um, that is what the taskbar is for in Windows!! Mac doesn't have a taskbar, and you always need to click the program (if you clicked on the desktop or another app) to get to the file menu. In windows, you just click the taskbar icon no matter what program you are using.
You are assuming that all users prefer the fullscreen view. Not so. And I've seen it for myself when users become confused since ALL of the Explorer windows and application windows in Windows have menus!
In windows, if you need to drag files to another place, you simply shrink the window, do your fast dragging and dropping, and the maximize and enjoy the web. I hope you do not surf the net just to drag files onto the desktop...
It's not that full screen is always useful, but not being able to have it for most apps is a pain in the ass. So far GarageBand holds the record for the largest maximization with the green arrow (for me).
Web designers do not think that at all. Most web sites on the internet are configured to go as large as your desktop resolution. Forums don't but having the whole window on the screen is just easier. With full screen, the least you can see is the maximum mac gives you default. You can see more sometimes with buttos on the page that extend it's noundaries. When you are not in a full screen internet window, and you go to a larger web page that takes up more room than the current window, you must click the green plus every time. With windows, you just click the button and it goes as big as your monitor allows. IE sucks with that, Safari is okay, but Firefox owns.
OK, show me how you are going to do your fast drag and drop from said webpage if you've minimized the window. I'd love to see that in person.
You would either have to right-click or use a key command to copy the file and then paste it to the desktop. This is not
on the fly! It's much faster and more intuitive to just
drag and drop the file to the desktop. In real life, you don't copy something and then paste it somewhere else to move it. You manually pick it up and move it over to a clean space. That's one of the things that makes the Mac OS experience comfortable...it mimics actual human actions moreso than Windows does.
And sure, some sites do adjust to your window settings, even if it's much larger than normal. However, it's not fun reading a line containing 2 feet of text (if your resolution is that high to show it that way in fullscreen). It actually becomes difficult to read an article quickly and easily because you have to span so much space to read it. And no, not all websites readjust accordingly either. Some of them use graphics and having it fullscreen can cause a background graphic to loop, which is not what the web designer intended to happen at all. I see it all the time when browsing the web in Camino with some sites.
For people with bad eyes, Windows allows you to make text and icons bigger but keep the same resolution. Reading full screen is easier because there is nothing to distract you and less eye movement on the screen. On mac's decision, another one of it's stupid ideas makes computing less flexible than it shold be.
How interesing since Microsoft has taken a lot of its ideas from the Macintosh OS. ::ha::
Anyways, consider that the Mac OS has always had accessibility features for the hearing and vision impaired and it's been doing this for years, even before Windows had any of it. I have a teacher at the school that I work at that is legally blind. She tells me that even increasing the text size in Windows doesn't help, as increasing the font size on the Explorer widgets makes using Windows difficult (thanks to its waste of space with extra menus and subwindows that include buttons within a window). The best that I could do for her was to bring the Magnifier whenever she logged in, and even that was crappy at best, only giving her half the screen magnified while the rest was normal sized.
The Mac OS has had great zooming capabilities as well as other assistive technologies since the early days of OS 7 (probably even earlier but I am not sure on that one). Mac OS X's Univeral Access is LIGHT YEARS ahead of what Windows offers, which makes it the best solution for users that require assistive technologies.
After all of this i'm glad you are hoping too. Choice is really what future software and OS's should be based on.
I'm glad that we can agree on this.
