I wrote a program (link in my URL above) that solves the distraction problem for me. I’m not a designer by any stretch of the imagination (you don’t have to try my GUI apps to know that), but the functionality has become essential for a distraction-free environment for me.
Programs I’m not paying attention to simply disappear from the screen.
I found the tool reSizer (Windows) to be very helpful in resizing and arranging windows. I gives quick and obvious keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Win+Arrow to move the window, Win+keypad to move a window to a corner, hide the current window temporarily…). It’s especially useful in a multi-monitor setting.
"pressing the maximize button "
No, in other words it isn’t a “maximize” button.
Do you press the “close” button and express surprise when it closes, thinking it to be a “marks the spot” button?
I’m suprised no one has mentioned the tiling window managers available for X such as ratpoison or Ion. I am a happy user of the Ion window manager. The idea is to partition your workspace into tiling frames each of which can have multiple tabs. It is a breeze to switch between frames – no alt-tab or expose’ necesary.
Now, if I only had an Ion equivalent for windows I would be a happy camper.
Of course you are right, neither solution is perfect. However, I do think you are wrong about something. One of the things I love about the Mac is how it makes it possible to manage more than one window at the same time, and therefore the maximize button really is redundant to me.
I’m a recent switcher, and as such was utterly confused by the weird green +. However, features like Expose soon had me using 10’s of windows, non maximized at the same time. Then whole new working methodologies appeared, the way I tried to complete tasks, how ready I was to use more than one application, how I laid out my screen were developed by me. Of course, none of this was conscious, I just “optimized” my behavior for the environment I was working in. For me, this is something quite remarkable. A colleague recently sat watching me push some slides out (of course I had to export to power-point) and as I grabbed the collateral from various places, took screen-shots, laid out the slides he said “It’s like its reading your mind, how are you even doing that?”
It’s not, and it may not work for everybody (I’m selfish enough to not care, it works for me, and that’s what REALLY matters to ME), but my god I love my +, and my multiple windows, and nudging my desktop into view, swishing the running applications around, as I clip through tasks.
“Dealing with multiple windows is far too difficult, even for sophisticated computer users.”
sounds like I’ve been spoiled by being able to alt+LMB+drag to move windows around in linux
in windows it’s just too much of a pain to go for that bar on the top of the window.
… Visual Studio is quite a MDI application, it’s too bad you can’t have seperate windows so you can have two forms open both showing different properties windows…
Or so you can have it spanning two monitors without having to tweak the split between windows to line up with your monitors [in addition to resizing visual studio to span two monitors, unless you have a fancy utility which extends the maximize button and want visual studio on all [2? 3? 4?] monitors]
It’s also too bad the splitting is limited to a single direction [though you can split more than once]. Admittedly without being able to see a different properties window for each thing I have open it’s not very useful, and the HUGE amount of time it takes to switch from one forms designer to the other… meh.
Jeff: “Designers should be coming up with alternative user interfaces that minimize windowing, instead of forcing enforcing arbitrary window size limits on the user for their own good.”
As I said here:
http://brianwill.net/blog/2007/03/19/i-hate-macs/
…I find the cumbersomeness of window arranging in current windowing systems to defeat the primary promise behind windowing—the ability to have multiple windows side-by-side. Macs push against this by discouraging full-screen windows, but this is quite annoying when I really want to just focus on one window and maximize its space. Nor does the scheme scale well past more than a few windows.
Anyway, Jeff’s post has motivated me to finally post my design for window management which I call ‘Portals’. Though incomplete, you can get notes and incomplete, crude, interactive mockups here:
http://brianwill.net/portalsdemo/portals_mockup.html
Leave your comments at:
In some specific situations, I really want the full-screen maximize effect. It’s a cognitive bias towards focusing entirely on just one window’s content (specifically, I want that when I’m doing some in depth coding; when debugging I much prefer to have a partial-screen window so I can see at least some part of the output in tandem with the code input). Most often, just enough screen real estate to fit the given content is enough (which is the general premise of the Mac ‘+’ window button as I understand it). That said, I’ve had several occasions where the Mac OSX ‘+’ doesn’t accurately fit the contents of a webpage and I still have a horizontal scrollbar when that function should eliminate it (unless it goes beyond the screen real estate, which it hasn’t or I wouldn’t bother complaining). In terms of dealing with limitations, it’s easier to make one window full-screen size than to make many windows fit perfectly with their contents but overall neither of the window-buttons really fully satisfy.
Drag and drop is the most utterly broken UI concept in the world.
Totally agree. It’s painful to set up because of all the window manipulation (target - destination), and it requires quite a bit of mouse skill.
Photoshop is MDI and I hate it to death, it’s the one thing that’s been irritating me since the big makeover in PS 6. Editplus is MDI and I couldn’t live without it, though. But that’s not what this article is about.
I often find myself maximizing things in Windows because the applications are designed to be maximized. On macs, they’re designed not to be. (With exceptions for each.) When applications can present a dense amount of information, like web browsers, file browsers, image browsers, or books/pdfs, I want it maximized or full-screen to make the best possible use of my monitor. When they don’t, I don’t care. Which is why it doesn’t bother me for the vast majority of mac apps (which are typically simpler than their windows counterparts), but it kills me to use Safari or Pages for long.
Very few dense windows apps will degrade to less-than-fullscreen very nicely; if there were more intelligence in automatic hiding or shrinking of panels, columns, buttons, etc, it would be much simpler to switch between full and windowed.
A windowed app paradigm most people use: Most chat clients, and most media players by default (especially embedded in-browser).
Drag and drop would be less broken if more things supported dragging out. Oh sure, everything lets you drag files in to open them, but developers sure are stingy about interoperating. I can’t count how many times I’ve wanted to drag from winamp, itunes, foobar, or any other media player to a chat window, ftp client, or web browser, but no can do, and requests have always fallen on deaf ears. Usefulness is drastically diminished that way.
My wife has a MacBook, so I’ve become familiar with OS X. I also continue to be floored by Mac’s design choices.
The entire idea of “snap window to size of contents” button smells of holier than thou attitude. Let’s take Slashdot, for example. How in the world would you know the “size of the contents”, since Slashdot scales to whatever width you give it.
Another design choice I highly disagree with is the inability to resize the window from anywhere but the bottom right corner. And now they’ve even brought this monstrosity to windows in the form of Safari. At least they had the good sense to add standard windows resizing conventions to iTunes.
The problem is that OSX isn’t consistent. In safari it resizes to fit the content, in iTunes it toggles the mini player, in finder it does god knows what.
In the finder, if it really worked the way Apple says it does, then hitting it twice should give you a window the same size as when you started. It doesn’t do that… in the finder every time you hit it, it gives you a different size.
Maximize buttons are responsible for encouraging one of the great sins of modern GUI app design: Sprawling UI layouts.
Consider the now-standard three-pane design for mailreaders, as used by Outlook, Thunderbird, and Mail.app: List of folders on the left, list of messages in the selected folder on the upper right, message contents on the lower right.
Compare to a traditional Unix mailreader such as mutt: The window contents consist of only one of these three views. Select a folder, and the folder list is replaced with the contents of the active folder. Select a message, and the message list is replaced with the message.
The mutt approach makes much more efficient use of screen space. How often do you want to look at the list of mailboxes and the contents of a message at the same time? Which would you rather have: More space to read a message in, or a list of other messages in the same mailbox?
UI designers accustomed to a single application consuming most or all of the available screen space don’t consider these issues.
what amazes me is the quote at the beginning. “Got the UI wrong when they copied it” and “Once again, Microsoft has no taste and no clue when it comes to the GUI”. Typical Mac attitude of never realizing that everyone else need not think the same way, and that “taste” and elegance" aren’t really absolute.
I like OSX, and I like the mac interface in general (I’m writing this on my first mac, and frankly I love it).
But the maximize button is, of pretty much all of the OSX UI, the most painfully retarded one:
It’s completely inconsistent, sometimes it does something useful, usually it doesn’t (e.g. in Emacs, clicking “maximize” reduces the window to around 300px wide, while making it as high as the screen. in Webkit, it does a windows-style maximize on most pages, same in camino, in finder it tries to remove the scrollbars without making the window wider, ever which basically means that if you have the default 2-icons-wide finder it makes your finder take the whole screen in height, and reduces its width, which is usually completely stupid)
It’s useless and pointless, especially since it usually fucks up nice windows size (because I tried to click on “minimize” and failed)
It promotes multiple window UIs. Which would be nice if OSX had a nice multiple-window handling. It doesn’t, it’s almost as bad as Windows. It has expose’s F10? Whop de doo, but it’s still unable to command-tab between windows of the same application, thank got for the Witch extension
“Can you name one application with a multiple window interface that’s even popular?”
SQL Query Analyzer
“Far more useful and elegant. Once again, Microsoft has no taste and no clue when it comes to the GUI. All that money and Gates has never been able to hire a decent human factors person.”
I can’t stand people who talk about Apple and Microsoft as if everything that Apple designs is perfect and everything that Microsoft designs is completely wrong. Maximizing a window is perfect for making it the ONLY window in view and removing all distractions, which is something I often like to do with all sorts of programs. I don’t do it often but it’s a great feature to have. If Apple’s design choice was so perfect, people wouldn’t write “Jedi” scripts for OSX that allow you to black out the screen and focus on a single document.
I think Windows Vista’s Tab-3D is a pretty smart feature; you can have all your windows maximized and tab through them, which is very useful for small laptops as well as situations when you are switching between programs but you don’t want your screen cluttered. IMO, Microsoft has some good human interface ideas and there is no “perfect” design coming from either company.
Pretty != useful.
All you mac preachers (I hate you too), please tell me:
What’s the use of this “zoom” button (or whatever you call it)? So you can see your wallpaper while browsing suck.com? Congrats champ, what do you do now? Take a screenshot of it and post on a mybeautifuldesktop.com?
Because this is just adding noise. It pretends to be useful. And people will use it, because it seems like a good idea and looks pretty.
The only standard app in Windows that behaves this way is cmd.exe (the command window also known as dos box lookalike). When you maximise it, it grows vertically, but for some lame reasons the width sticks to 80 characters. Yes, it’s possible to change it to some whopping 120 or whatever, but you CAN’T maximize the window as other apps do.
Quite a pain in the ass when you talk to mysql or traceroute.
I disagree with Damien Neil - multiple content areas are useful. Admittedly it works even better when your desktop spans more than one monitor.
As a webdesigner I have to have a minimum of 5 web browsers, 1 code editor, photoshop, windows file explorer, ftp client and potentially other things such as IEUnit.
I found Gridmove on the web and haven’t looked back since. I made my own grid to allow me to drag windows to specific areas of the screen where they all majically slot in the “content areas” I have designated. Combine this with two monitors and the enhanced “alt-tab” program from Microsoft and my development environment means I just have to flick my head from left to right with a few key taps to check the fine adjustments I have to make to my style sheets to create cross browser websites.
If you haven’t tried it yet and your on a windows machine I highly recommend Gridmove; I would put it up there with fire bug, IEunit, and macros in firefox - seriously…