About Windoze/Mac and Maximizing...

[mkrishnan]

I say why don't you let Apple know? Surely there will be others than just you and me that would like that as an option in Preview, no?

Hmmm...perhaps I will. Wondered if anyone thought it would be nice first. I guess it'd be best if apps had the option to have some kind of rooted or tabbed behavior or rootless behavior. IIRC there are some PC apps that have this kind of option, aren't there?

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Hmmm...perhaps I will. Wondered if anyone thought it would be nice first. I guess it'd be best if apps had the option to have some kind of rooted or tabbed behavior or rootless behavior. IIRC there are some PC apps that have this kind of option, aren't there?

The only Windows application I know of that does this is MS Visual Studio, and that isn't by any means cheap.

 

[Makosuke]

Basically, the optimal state is supposed to be just big enough so that the scroll bars are eliminated or the need for scrolling is minimized if the document is too big.

Exactly, and as far as I'm concerned this is far preferable to maximizing the window to fill the screen 95% of the time (though admittedly, in practice, not all app developers do a good job with this).

Examples:

1) I open a Finder window with 10 items in a list; the whole list isn't quite visible, but to save time instead of dragging the corner to enlarge it I just click the happy green button. Now it's just big enough to show the whole list, no bigger. If it (or any other Finder window) expanded to fill the entire screen, it would be entirely useless, and nobody would EVER use that button in the finder.

2) I'm working in a Word document on my nice big Apple widescreen display. If the green button filled the screen with it, I would end up with two thirds of the screen covered with a blank blue background with a small white page over toward the left. This is pointless, so Word just makes the window wide enough to display the whole page. (Of course, MS apparently can't think straight, so in Word X anyway it uses a fixed width that only works for about 100% zoom, but that's their fault.)

3) I want to make a movie in Quicktime Player bigger, so I click the button. In this case, the "optimal" size is fullscreen, so the video window gets as big as it can (though unlike Windows still doesn't forcefully cover the areas of the screen to its sides, just maxes out).

Point being that while fullscreen display can occasionally be an advantage, in the vast majority of specific windows it ranges from undesirable to absolutely stupid. There's also the fact that despide a lack of visual feedback maximizing a window in Windows locks it in that position, which is annoying if you want to resize it, since you first have to "unlock" it, then resize with the corners.

This is a preferable system; the only annoyance comes when programmers (the Word team, for example) don't make it do what you expect it to. And it's not something Apple could do automatically, since "optimal" will be different depending on the app and what's in the window (videos versus icons, for example).