On consistency

By | May 5, 2010

Apple seems to think that nobody ever needs to maximize their application windows.  Instead, they provide a “zoom” button, which is supposed to toggle the window between “show as much content as possible” and a user-defined (manually set) size.

The problem is that this “zoom” button (which doesn’t actually zoom anything) is extremely inconsistent in behavior.  I draw these examples from my usage yesterday:

  • Terminal and Xcode treat “zoom” as “maximize”.
  • Safari tries to resize to fit content, but much of the time it’s wrong, and sometimes it fails entirely.  For example, on more than one website I clicked “zoom” and the window shrank, hiding even more content; clicking it again to try to toggle it back had no effect.  Safari seemed to do that a lot – the “zoom” button would simply do nothing, regardless of whether I had resized the window manually or not.
  • iTunes treats it as a toggle between miniature mode and the user-defined size.  That’s hardly a “zoom”, now is it?

If you search the intertubes for “OSX maximize window”, you’ll find that pretty much every Mac-centric forum is populated entirely by people who believe nobody ever needs to maximize windows (never mind that some of Apple’s own apps do exactly that); the common reply to “I want to maximize this window” is “no, you don’t” and “just live without it, you’ll get used to it”.  (Yeah, because you have no choice…)

There’s something to be said for the fact that even if “maximize” is not strictly necessary, at least you always know what the button will do (speaking of the functionality in Windows and Linux).

I don’t want to argue about whether the whole UI paradigm of OSX is right or wrong, but at the very least it should be consistent

Oh, and one other thing.  Apple, if you’re going to enforce a “no maximized windows” idea (by not supporting window maximization by default), you should at least enable snap-to-borders.

5 thoughts on “On consistency

  1. Pierce Johnson

    I reading this in a maximized window right now. Dan, it probably has something to do with closed standards and limitations of flash. Maybe in the open future the closed system of maximizing will be open to everybody. Oh but wait, they don’t like cross-platform stuff. Yeah, maximized windows isn’t cool. Apple is WAY to cool for that. They do have maximized windows on the iPhone though, but they just call it being able to only have one app open at a time. Ha!

    Reply
  2. Janssen

    I actually preferred the window maximize/zoom button in Mac OS pre-X (a.k.a. Classic). It was more consistent and behaved more like a true maximize.

    On Mac OS X, I find it helpful to hide the dock (command + option + D) when using the zoom button so that the window goes to the bottom of the screen, but your preference will depend on how tall the dock is and whether you like it hidden normally.

    Unfortunately, by trying to make the zoom button “smart”, it has become very inconsistent. Is it too much to ask for a blue button up there that is a true maximize? There are probably 3rd party utilities that produce this feature. I’m pretty sure resizing windows is fairly easy in AppleScript.

    I’ve also been wishing for a snap-to-border feature for about 15 years, but I guess that guy on the Windows 7 ad came up with the idea before I did 😉 … or Linux for that matter.

    Reply
  3. Dan

    I’ve been looking around at third-party solutions to the “zoom” problem. The only one that seems to be out there is called “RightZoom”, but I installed it and it merely broke the zoom button for everything, rather than working as advertised.

    Is it too much to ask for a blue button up there that is a true maximize?

    My sentiments exactly.

    Reply
  4. Steve Jobs

    Weep no longer, my little friends, for I have invented a truly amazing innovation that will solve all your problems.

    Inspired by the iPad, OS X Lion introduces the dazzling FULL SCREEN feature. At the touch of a button, your applications will expand to fill the entire screen, so you can see more than ever before! This completely original concept once again proves that OS X is at the cutting edge of GUI technology.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *