Close, minimize, and maximize are now close, minimize, and full screen, eliminating the extra full-screen control and consolidating the window controls in one place. Streamlining these and other elements of the interface means you can navigate the desktop more efficiently.
OS X’ idea of “maximise” was “some random window resizing nobody really used anyway”, so I’m glad Apple finally replaced it with something else. Too bad OS X’ fullscreen view is way too disruptive for my tastes to be of any practical use.
How damned hard is it to calculate the maximum window size and set the size of the current window to that? Windows has been doing this for, what, like 20+ years. I seem to remember it used to work on MacOS of old.
Full screen is not the same as maximize, especially on the Mac, where you get a new pseudo desktop for the fullscreen window. Fullscreen hides things I want to see. The only time I don’t want to see them is when I am watching a video, which is the only time I use fullscreen mode.
But no, instead of fixing broken functionality, they remove it, and update the UI with transparency. Yay!
While I’ve never really used OS X (I am a Linux guy), I was always intrigued by that green button. I knew what it supposed to do, and I knew that some apps (eg. Firefox) just didn’t care and used it as a maximize feature. I kind of always wished that one of the window managers of Linux would have this feature somehow, because I was curious if I would use it.
I personally rarely every use fullscreen/maximized windows. (Full screen only for games and sometimes video, maxmized is for apps that have a complicated interface eg. Gimp, or maybe some kind of IDE.) For something like a web browser I don’t really see the point of maximization, when 95% of sites work well in a ~1024 wide window. Apps with long lists (eg. a list view in a file browser, or an RSS reader or a mail app) also usually don’t benefit from being as wide as my screen size.
so yeah.. weirdly enough, since as I said, I never got to use the feature I’m kind of sad now that it’s getting removed. I wonder if anyone actually used it.
The “zoom” feature was one of those things about OS X that annoyed me at first, then I got the hang of it and grew to love it. I still got a little annoyed when the OS and I didn’t agree on exactly what size the window should be, but honestly that only ever happened with the Finder and I learned to manage it well enough that it didn’t frustrate me any more.
I can see where some people just wouldn’t be able to use it productively, but I’m with you: I want to see it as an optional feature in a GNU/Linux WM or DE, just to see how far the idea can be stretched.
Ditto. Even worse is when I’m sending the stream to a AppleTV device; I want the damn video fullscreen on the AppleTV but I can only do that if I render all three of my other screens entirely unusable. Smooth move, OS X.
http://www.airsquirrels.com/airparrot/
I am not sure if this will work in 10.10 when it is released, but I use BetterTouchTool to provide Windows 7-like functionality with dragging to the top performing what most would consider a maximize (not fullscreen). I understand the issue is, really, that Apple would not provide a generally accepted maximize button, but this works great for me.
Damn right. I’ve been using a Mac for a few years now and the fact that they still haven’t worked out how to handle windows correctly never ceases to amaze me.
I think that’s a truer statement. The zoom does exactly what it is meant to do. It just doesn’t do what *you* want it to.
No, it isn’t. Having a maximise button does, or should do, exactly what you should expect – MAXIMISE. Having a button that randomly expands to a subsection of the screen is completely and utterly useless. I can just drag and expand the window if that’s the case.
Telling me it just doesn’t do what I want it to do is complete crap and the biggest piece of fanboy cop-out there is. This is basic historical windowing convention we’re talking about here.
Edited 2014-06-07 14:00 UTC
I don’t use it that much myself, but for some apps it worked quite well – the idea being not to maximise it but make it fit its contents properly. Unfortunately, for many apps that did indeed seem random. Pity, it could have been a decent feature if they had fixed it properly early on…
I’ve been so annoyed with that broken maximize after switching from windows that I simply started to use exclusively http://spectacleapp.com/ for maximazing and windows management…
Except it’s not “broken maximise”, it’s zoom. It’s an entirely different concept on an entirely different OS. As you said, you came from Windows, where all you’ve ever known is “min, max, exit”. On the Mac, it’s “close window without exiting the program, minimize to the dock, zoom to show the window contents”, each of which is alien to Windows.
In other words, just because it’s different and uncomfortable for you doesn’t mean it’s broken for everyone.
Actually I was using it until I found spectacle, and spectacle is like what we had in kde ages ago. Somehow they are caving back on the philosophy they had, and only caring about ugly metallic colors. There is nothing innovative in Mac OS anymore, or I am totally just bitching!!!
Right; I completely fail to see any usefulness in those – only common thing is minimise so I’ll leave it out:
– maximize/zoom – i’m a bit of control freak so I want windows to be in place where I put it, stick to that place – I dread desktop with about 5 windows that are ‘zoomed’ and scattered across it – I can’t have access to all of them as they overlap so this sucks; when I maximize window under windows window takes whole screen (leaving controls) and sticks to that position – not with osx apps, which even zoomed to whole screen are movable (there was spotify on windows which had same issue and it didn’t stick on my hard drive long); I want multiple windows at once? shure – but they either have to stick to each other or take 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 of the space and always be at correct/expectable location (spectacle helps with the latter, I’m still struggling to find sticky-windows replacement) – I still have access to all apps and they don’t overlap making them miserably useless;
– closing window – it was confusing at first but I got hold of it (using cmd+q quite a lot); what’s the point of keeping and app in the background without any purpose… I stop working with document I close it and don’t need word processor sitting in the background taking memory because-of-the-reason (yes, automatic memory management is retarded as well). And this also bite-me-in-the-arse with firefox and restoring closed tabs as, hooray, closing the window closed the window – not the browser, so after clicking on the dock I didn’t have previous session but rather empty window as firefox didn’t restart – merely opened new window… argh!)
Which is fine by all means. I fail to see the usefulness in strict tiling window managers with no window controls whatsoever, but there are some users out there who do everything with a keyboard, and I’m sure it’s a boon for them. However, I’m not going to call their system “broken” just because it fails to meet my own needs. They didn’t write it for me, they wrote it for the people who do find it useful. That’s my issue with your take on this: Because it doesn’t fit your strict requirements, you call it “broken” for everyone.
Exactly.
Where I called it ‘broken for everyone’? I called it broken, and this was my commend hence, ta-da, my opinion to which I’m entitled…
Saying something is “broken” implies it simply cannot be used by anyone, anywhere. Let’s take archery. A bow made for left handed people isn’t “broken”, it’s simply not made for right-handers. A right-handed archer won’t pick up a left-handed bow and say “I can’t use this because it’s broken”, he will put it down and pick up a right-handed bow and hit his target, or else he will learn to shoot left-handed. Either way, the left-handed bow can still be used, by him with training or by a left-handed archer.
If you had said “this doesn’t work for me” I wouldn’t have had an issue, in fact I would have agreed with your assessment and gone on reading. I stopped and replied because your implication that a working system is “broken” just because you don’t like it was patently false.
Minimize-to-tray performs “Close window without exiting the program”. Minimize performs “minimize to the dock”. Zoom/Auto-fit performs “zoom”. The first two are provided by stock Windows, zoom is a selectable feature present in most software where it makes sense to have it. This has been the case for ages. So no, this stuff is not “alien to Windows”. It’s old news.
Which is why it SHOULD be optional, so people can set it however they want. (And preferably, on a per-application level.) But Apple has never really been about giving people options. It’s either their way or the highway.
Edited 2014-06-03 18:23 UTC
You can option-click the green button (old behavior to get Maximize) and double-click the window title bar to Zoom.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they provide a preference for the behavior, if there is a Terminal switch to reverse the behavior, or if any number of utilities to modify various system tweaks will not immediately be available.
But I’m sure you installed the beta yesterday and tested it out and were aware that the optional behavior is still there, even in a product that will not be finished for 2-4 months.
Edited 2014-06-03 20:27 UTC
I don’t disagree, it should be optional. But by that token, the Windows maximize button should optionally allow for zooming, right?
Thank you for pointing me to this great app. It makes it much more tolerable to use a Mac for me.
Thanks,
seems like their are fixing the stupid design mistakes they were doing in the past one by one. Last year we got tabs and now a maximise button as integral part of windows decoration.
Next year they will add the “spectacle”, they become the new windows but only with proper shell.
So, instead of fixing Maximize, something that people has been asking for years, they just replaced it with something that people just don’t care about?
Thanksfully we have Spectacle.
So they finally axed the broken zoom feature … it seems that Apple is starting to develop some common sense as of late. Probably Job’s influence is finally dying. Good riddance.
Zoom is interesting, though I’m in the habit of holding down shift when clicking the green button. 99% of the time Shift+Zoom works like Windows/Linux maximize.
Full screen on the other hand is less than worthless. I’m a developer with multiple monitors. Full screen turns those extra monitors into useless gray screens.
Why is it so difficult to full screen a YouTube video or movie on the large monitor for my daughter to watch while I’m working on an app on the other two? Ironically, that “just works” on Linux and Windows.
Yes, there you go. I like it like that, since I use AmigaOS as well, and that also has the shift-click-to-maximise thing… Not to mention most of the same keyboard shortcuts. Having the shift-click feature there means you can get the best of both worlds… If you know it exists (which I guess most people don’t).
The worthless gray screens issue was fixed in 10.9. Now when an app is in fullscreen mode it only takes over one display, and the others are still available for use by other desktops or fullscreen apps.
but the workspaces are still linked, making it still fairly broken. It pretty much breaks the entire reason for having two screens. One for fullscreen work and another for reference.
If workspaces did not exist, then nobody would be spreading apps across them, so this issue does not exist in windows.
Well, here’s how it works in 10.9: workspaces are linked to, and switched on, each individual screen. So switching workspaces on monitor 1 doesn’t change workspaces on monitor 2 or 3, and vice versa.
This means that you can have one monitor sitting there for reference, another for “work”, and switch active applications separately on each one.
Only if you’ve actually turned on the terrible “Improved multiple monitor” support in 10.9, and then you have a whole bunch of new problems to contend with.
The original full screen in lion did indeed make two monitors useless, but this isn’t the case anymore. 10.9 allows you to treat monitors as there own desktops and full screen apps one one with out regard of what is on the other.
I personally, use this with remote desktop apps where my secondary monitor is a full screen VM or remote desktop session and I work on my primary in OS X.
Regarding Zoom, I feel it is one of those things you either like or you don’t. I’ll be honest and admit that I keep TotalSapces and SizeUp installed so I mostly move and re-size windows with my keyboard, but this is true when I use win 7/8 as well.
Monitors are larger now we run them at 1080P to 4k your wasting your realistate to maximize things and I believe zoom was intended to help people realize that. It wasn’t intuitive coming from windows, but once I read about the feature I grew to like it and the fact that applications could overwrite the behavior was a feature I liked.
My Email clients and Browsers maximize along with SQL Browsers and large apps, these are normally detailed enough that the interface justifies taking up most of my screen, but text editors, file browsers and other small apps only get large enough to show all the relevant information then I move them in to place.
I have since come to realize this is more efficient then windows and actually helped teach you to multitask. OS X isn’t perfect, but what desktop is.
Fullscreen is useful on laptops. I never use it on large screens though.
For me, the usefulness of OS X’s fullscreen mode didn’t really become apparent until I figured out I could switch workspaces quickly by three-finger swipe on the trackpad more comfortably than any key combination I’ve tried.
Note that the first version (Lion?) made fullscreen mode HORRIBLE with multiple monitors because the other monitors got blanked out when something was in fullscreen mode. It’s much more flexible now, and lets you swap desktops separately on each monitor.
I also find I like it for certain uses when I’ve got an external screen or two attached — running IDEs like Xcode or IntelliJ fullscreen on one 1080p monitor, then using the other(s) for terminal/chat/simulator/web/misc workspace makes it easy to reserve a large screen for the IDE, not have other things take it over too much, and if I have to run multiple IDEs at the same time for related projects I can easily switch between them.
I have a reasonable large screen (27″) and use the fullscreen mode for VLC and the pdf reader (2 pages fit and are readable)
OSX window management is a bit annoying, some times I drag a windows when wanting to use the scrollbar and finder windows are the worst.
Was the Mac OS X “zoom” button the same as the “zoom” button that’s still in Haiku? I kind of like using it in Haiku.
Yes, the Zoom button resizes to best fit the contents of the window like in Haiku (but it didn’t always work, e.g. Safari occasionally jumped to the lower left corner of the screen or, worse still, to under the menu bar meaning you couldn’t get at it).
Edited 2014-06-03 14:59 UTC
This is a real disappointment. It was annoying enough when they removed the “pill†button which quickly hid toolbars/sidebars, and now this removed the Zoom button! However, I appear to be in the minority.
The green Zoom button was one of those little features that I loved about OS X over Windows and it’s a great shame if it’s gone. Quickly resizing a window to view it contents was brilliant (when it worked). As long as the Yosemite apps resize automatically to fill their contents I don’t mind, but if we’ve got to start dragging window corners, it will be very annoying!
I never use the minimize button, instead opting to move windows into a new Space. Apple, give us the option to customise the window controls, e.g. let me replace minimize with Zoom.
I never understood the Hide function (cmd+H) which literal just hides the window rather than minimizing it. Is this option still there? If so, please Apple, replace that with the Zoom function.
(p.s. First ever post, despite reading OS News for years!)
Edited 2014-06-03 14:40 UTC
I agree. I really miss the zoom to fit content of BeOS, and the zoom feature of OS X was nice.
I’m constantly having to resize windows on Linux and Windows, and it gets old. It would be really nice to have a zoom feature on them.
I should be noted that I very rarely ever have windows at full screen. It happens mostly on my laptop, but my desktop has larger screens which I like to tile with windows.
This is a battle Apple lost… when? Windows 3.1, 95, 98, or XP?
Sorry to the stalwarts.
IMO this was kept different ONLY because Jobs insisted Cupertino be different.
No, I’d say windows 7. The snap feature is killer. KDE wisely copied and even improved it. Once it existed, it was obvious that it was insanely great. It was what Apple was implying people do ( and hence MDI interfaces), but they never actually did.
Strangely enough though, it really kind of was a return to windows 3.1 with its window tileing feature. That was windows 3.1, right? I might be getting that confused with something else.
oh i hate that feature. when i am trying to get work done and i move a window to the top of the screen it always engages and resizes the window when i don’t want it to.
i also hate the shake to minimize feature on windows.
I didn’t know you could shake to minimize, thanks!
Windows 1.0 was tiling.
“Too bad OS X’ fullscreen view is way too disruptive for my tastes to be of any practical use.”
Well, Thom … With OSX [or Windows, for that matter] you basically have no choice. You only have what they give you and you can’t really change it.
The old zoom is still there, if you Option-click the green button or double-click on the window title bar. Boom! Back to way it always was. Maybe, just maybe, if you got your hands on the beta, or got actual facts. Wow, man, just wow.
…why Mac OS X have (had) “fit to content” and not “maximise” button require some thinking and history knowledge.
Windows invented MDI interface, which have sense on small resolution monitors, while Mac OS X embrace idea of “unlimited” desktop size.
This text can help to understand difference in philosophy between two:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/01/dock-and-wind…
That was a fun read. Thanks for the link.
I came across this quote about WWDC that I thought was very interesting indeed.
Source: http://fortune.com/2014/06/03/apple-wwdc-second-day/
But….I thought full-screen apps is what people want. Microsoft, with Windows 8, at first mandated full-screen application windows on the Metro side of the OS, or maybe half-screen or something weird. Odd how things change when it’s Apple we’re talking about. Thom raved about Windows 8 and its full-screen apps for a while, now he tells us that full-screen apps on Apple have been of no use to him. Very strange.
Personally, I use the full-screen capability once in a while. Not all applications have the capability, it is there in the OS if developers want to take advantage of it but they don’t have to, just a good example of flexible design, leave it to the developers to put in or not. It can be handy if all you are doing is using one application and don’t need to mess with anything in a menu bar. To each his own, it is neither good or bad, just a choice, and choice is good.
Thom can be a bit interesting, if not just full on, full of shit, huh? LOL
mac os is so good at remembering window positions. that i just manually resize it once and use the same window size for a long time.