Resizing windows in mac

If you resize a window once (iPhoto for example) it will remember its size the next time you open it. There is no Full Screen mode in OSX. Sizeup offers some useful shortcuts:

http://osx.iusethis.com/app/sizeup

 

Most programs should remember window size from loading to loading. E.G., when you close iTunes or Firefox or Safari, the next time you open it, it should be in the same size and location.

OTOH, in general, most Mac apps don't believe in full screen, for a wide variety of reasons that have been beaten to death on this forum over the years. The green ball in the upper left tells a program to toggle between its current size and the size it considers optimal -- this varies from app to app. Some choose to become as big as possible, other toggle to a minimal mode (e.g. iTunes), and others adjust to fit content (e.g. I think most of the browsers adjust to fit the width of the page and the height of the screen).

Give it a try for a while and see how you get used to it. I honestly don't miss full screen much when I'm using OS X.

Now there might be a few apps that don't remember the size and location you specified -- if that's the case, you should complain to their developers to fix it. If all of your apps are doing this, there might be something wrong with your user account....

 

Hmmm... I think that might be a toughie. IIRC, Preview is designed to always try and pick an optimal size for the window when it opens a document -- for instance if you open a PDF it tries to pick a window size that will let it display the whole page of the PDF. Office kind of does its own thing, too...

I'm not sure how much you can do about those two.

 

The size a PDF opens at is usually set in the PDF file itself. I'm not sure there's much you can do about it.

 

FWIW that's not strictly intrinsically true. At least, Adobe Acrobat (which has as much a claim as anyone to represent how PDFs are "supposed" to work) opens with a fixed window size and then either presents the PDF with letter-boxing and/or shows a portion of the page, depending on the size of the window and the size of the PDF. So it's possible in principle.

 

There are settings in Preview's Preferences, but they're very limited:

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Just to confirm or clarify about PDFs:

In Acrobat Pro and other PDF editors, you can set how the PDF you have created is displayed upon opening by a third party. Options include: a range of set percentages, actual size, fit page, fit width, fit height, full screen etc. The default is usually 100%.

When sending out PDFs as proofs, I usually set them to 'fit page' for convenience at first glance.

 

The way window sizing is handled in OSX isn't the greatest. It's a small
price to pay for a brilliant operating system.