Maximize (Windows)

I was seeing this one article on Digg that talks about how the maximize button in Windows compares to the zoom button in Mac OS. The maximize button on Windows always makes a window enlarge until it fills the whole screen. On the Mac, for the most part hitting the zoom button makes a window resize to fit it's contents. So for example when you are maximizing a browser on Windows it just fills the whole screen.. on the Mac when you hit the zoom button it makes the window pretty much page sized (the size where two of them can fit on a widescreen display).

I found that when I started getting bigger monitors with higher resolution especially 1280x1024 the maximize button in windows made less and less sense especially for applications such as instant messengers. So I hardly ever used the maximize button. Although I hardly use the zoom button in OS X either because usually I have the window sized just the way I like it and it remembers that the next time I open that window. I have also noticed on OS X it's up to the progammer what the zoom button does so some programs "maximize" the windows way and others zoom to fit the contents such as I just noticed Adium does that although it's one of those programs I mentioned that doesn't make sense to maximize to full screen on my size of desktop and of course iTunes switches between a mini window and a regular window when you hit the zoom button.

So uh.. the point. Yeah, maximizing to full screen doesn't make too much sense when you have a large screen.

Maximize (Windows)

I was seeing this one article on Digg that talks about how the maximize button in Windows compares to the zoom button in Mac OS. The maximize button on Windows always makes a window enlarge until it fills the whole screen. On the Mac, for the most part hitting the zoom button makes a window resize to fit it's contents. So for example when you are maximizing a browser on Windows it just fills the whole screen.. on the Mac when you hit the zoom button it makes the window pretty much page sized (the size where two of them can fit on a widescreen display).

I found that when I started getting bigger monitors with higher resolution especially 1280x1024 the maximize button in windows made less and less sense especially for applications such as instant messengers. So I hardly ever used the maximize button. Although I hardly use the zoom button in OS X either because usually I have the window sized just the way I like it and it remembers that the next time I open that window. I have also noticed on OS X it's up to the progammer what the zoom button does so some programs "maximize" the windows way and others zoom to fit the contents such as I just noticed Adium does that although it's one of those programs I mentioned that doesn't make sense to maximize to full screen on my size of desktop and of course iTunes switches between a mini window and a regular window when you hit the zoom button.

So uh.. the point. Yeah, maximizing to full screen doesn't make too much sense when you have a large screen.