Zoom
In my opinion, zoom is an alright idea but has been forced into scrutiny by the vasty more consistent maximize button of Windows UX style (and of OS 9 UX as well). Maximizing your window always makes it fullscreen, no matter what you wanted before. While I agree it is more consistent than zoom it gives the user of fat ideas. To clarify fat idea - an idea that you can use as much as your want without thinking about how much you're taking in or wasting. You can apply this to ram usage nowadays, with 4 gigs of ram laptops are just getting more and more bloated with useless fat apps and devs are programming fatter programs for the simplest tasks.
Returning to my point, zoom allows you to maximize your screen space usage but the down side is that it is very inconsistent to maximize. Expose and spaces have made it so that zoom is very unnecessary because you no longer need to place documents behind your window in order to see them.
So I've come up with some options to improve zoom:
-- cmd-click - fits window to screensize (one of the most wanted feature in OS X no doubt)
-- control-click - centers the window to screen x,y and sizes to the proper content size
-- regular click - default zoom usage
Also, standardize Zoom usage across apps.
Currently Zoom does the following for the apps:
Pages 09 - alternates between user set and default page size
Keynote 09 - alternates between user set and default slide size
Numbers 09 - zooms to full screen
iTunes - changes regular player to mini player
iCal - zooms to full screen
Mail - zooms to full screen
Firefox - zooms to full screen
Safari - alternates between user set and to fit content
Finder - alternates between user set and to fit content
Garageband 08 - zooms to full screen
iMovie 08 - zooms to full screen
iPhoto 08 - zooms to full screen
When i say fullscreen.. I don't mean that the content is bigger than the screen. In Numbers especially half the screen is wasted so it's obviously zooming to full screen rather than to the content.
Rice Capsule
This is one interface paradigm I have never gotten my head around. Screen resolutions are large enough to warrant the removal of this capsule for something more functional (like toggle fullscreen) Removing icons from the header bar to maximize screen usage is pointless considering the amount of functionality being removed from the app vs the small amount of pixel increase (the window doesn't actually increase in size to accommodate for the missing header bar icons so the whole point of the capsule is lost IMO)
IMO remove the rice capsule all together. Replace it with something like a fullscreen toggler which makes the app go into fullscreen mode (a la Pages 09) or make it the maximize button.
In my opinion, zoom is an alright idea but has been forced into scrutiny by the vasty more consistent maximize button of Windows UX style (and of OS 9 UX as well). Maximizing your window always makes it fullscreen, no matter what you wanted before. While I agree it is more consistent than zoom it gives the user of fat ideas. To clarify fat idea - an idea that you can use as much as your want without thinking about how much you're taking in or wasting. You can apply this to ram usage nowadays, with 4 gigs of ram laptops are just getting more and more bloated with useless fat apps and devs are programming fatter programs for the simplest tasks.
Returning to my point, zoom allows you to maximize your screen space usage but the down side is that it is very inconsistent to maximize. Expose and spaces have made it so that zoom is very unnecessary because you no longer need to place documents behind your window in order to see them.
So I've come up with some options to improve zoom:
-- cmd-click - fits window to screensize (one of the most wanted feature in OS X no doubt)
-- control-click - centers the window to screen x,y and sizes to the proper content size
-- regular click - default zoom usage
Also, standardize Zoom usage across apps.
Currently Zoom does the following for the apps:
Pages 09 - alternates between user set and default page size
Keynote 09 - alternates between user set and default slide size
Numbers 09 - zooms to full screen
iTunes - changes regular player to mini player
iCal - zooms to full screen
Mail - zooms to full screen
Firefox - zooms to full screen
Safari - alternates between user set and to fit content
Finder - alternates between user set and to fit content
Garageband 08 - zooms to full screen
iMovie 08 - zooms to full screen
iPhoto 08 - zooms to full screen
When i say fullscreen.. I don't mean that the content is bigger than the screen. In Numbers especially half the screen is wasted so it's obviously zooming to full screen rather than to the content.
Rice Capsule
This is one interface paradigm I have never gotten my head around. Screen resolutions are large enough to warrant the removal of this capsule for something more functional (like toggle fullscreen) Removing icons from the header bar to maximize screen usage is pointless considering the amount of functionality being removed from the app vs the small amount of pixel increase (the window doesn't actually increase in size to accommodate for the missing header bar icons so the whole point of the capsule is lost IMO)
IMO remove the rice capsule all together. Replace it with something like a fullscreen toggler which makes the app go into fullscreen mode (a la Pages 09) or make it the maximize button.