@Aaron G on July 18, 2007 06:15 AM:
That’s the best S/S variation I have ever seen. Thanks.
Sorry for the off-topicity but this discussion is in serious need of being derailed.
One thing I am missing in this discussion is the topic of Fitts Law: “The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.”
On the Mac the MenuBar resides independent of the application running at the same place, namely at the top of the monitor. Why this is good is explained in Fitts Law.
On Windows the MenuBar is associated with the Window so Maximizing the window will position the MenuBar always at the same place and thus makes it easier to find and hit.
I imagine that this is one of the reasons why Windows User are really depending on the so called maximzing buttons and Mac Users do not even care about.
What do you think?
me.
I mean, of course the best S/S variation.
Dude it was nice to see suck on someone else;s browser. Even though the site has been dead for six years now.
@Meikel Steiding
Re-read Fitts Law. If the toolbar is at the top it is further away from the actual area you are working in, therefore it takes more time to acquire the target. Maximizing to keep the toolbar at the top is really only good if you keep the mouse at the top too…
I don’t have an opinion as to which is “best”, but I can offer a few observations have had a quick look around the office here (I am one of 3 technical staff out of approx. 50), but everyone here does use a computer (WinXP) to some degree.
- Everyone I checked has all of their windows maximized, all of the time
- Only I, a highly technical user, use many non-maximized windows
- Of the people I asked, all preferred maximized windows
- Most (90%) had less than 3 windows open (usually Word and Outlook)
- Of all the people I asked, all preferred a “simple interface with few windows” over “an interface with many windows on the screen at the same time”.
So make of that what you will. My own preferences are almost entirely at odds with those of my fellow workmates, but then, I do very different things with my computer.
Another interesting observation is that Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 has adopted Windows-style palette docking, which better suits a maximized working environment (i.e., one that takes up the whole screen).
The inability to fully maximize (OS X keyboard ninja protip - you can shift+click on the green button to fully maximize the window… sometimes) windows is an annoyance - when I’m on a single-minded task (developing or writing), I don’t want to be distracted by anything in the negative space. That’s a pretty sure-fire recipe for breaking out of flow.
That said, I think that Apple finally got it right and one of the really nice things about Safari on the iPhone is that it’s smart about columns. When you bring up a plain old web page optimized for computer monitors, things are going to be, unsurprisingly, tiny. But double-tap on the meat of the page (the middle column where the text is) and it zooms in on that. All those ads and the navigation text in the sidebars? Gone from your view and the text is pleasantly readable all of a sudden.
It’s nice enough that I find myself wanting to see this on my big computer browsers.
Apple is wrong, and here’s why: CSS3 Media Queries.
If you’ve got separate stylesheets that are chosen based on the available screen area, and a screen area that decides how big it needs to be based on the content, it’s a classic deadlock problem. Or else, Mac users will just have to get used to the lowest common denominator display.
I think something interesting here is that I run dual monitors within a linux environment and I utilize all 4 desktops. That comes out to (technically) 8 screens; and every one of my screens has multiple applications running on it thus bringing the “Z-axis” as you put it. I don’t think this is really a big deal; you just start to learn where you put things and it becomes second nature knowing where you put all your stuff 
Let’s step backwards; (I don’t know how many people have already stated this seeing as it’s so plainly obvious) IE allows you to run multiple screens along with Firefox. So I guess I don’t really care too much for Windows; I’m used to *nix where I can run multiple instances of applications and not care how many I have running. Although for some applications this can cause some very bad (other times interesting) results.
I couldn’t be bothered to read all the comments, so this may be duplicative.
For many programs, expanding to fill the size of the screen, and maximizing to fit the size of the content is equivalent.
I use Windows exclusively at work and Mac almost exclusively at home.
Having lots of screen real estate is one of my key requirements. At work, I do the side-by-side dual 20" monitor thing and put Visual Studio and DebugView on one and run my apps and put the Visual Studio Documentation on the other. Seems to work well enough. I always maximize Visual Studio as it has lots of panels and GUI development (at least for me) requires real estate.
At home, I’ve got the 24" iMac and so real estate isn’t a problem. I do the Expose thing there and can hop around between the half-dozen windows that I have open but not minimized when I want to with no issues. Perhaps if I had 20 windows open it would be an issue, but in practice I don’t have anywhere near that many open often.
Maybe the issue with the zoom button is the plus sign, as the xvsxp discussion mentioned. If it weren’t a + sign, that might eliminate some confusion. I think that shift-clicking on the zoom button on the mac maximizes most windows. Don’t see why they couldn’t hook the fact that the shift key was depressed and change the button’s look.
Lots of good opinions here - they’ve given me something to think about.
I program on a dual monitor setup. I have my coding in one monitor, maximized, and my design in the other monitor, also maximized. I don’t need to see my wallpaper while I’m coding, nor do I need to look at anything else. The music still plays while minimized, so that’s fine.
I can only think of one time I wanted to work in three windows. I was migrating code from one language to another, and I needed to keep a reference open to make sure I wasn’t going to create horrible syntax errors. Two windows for code and a window full of mistakes not to make.
“Dealing with multiple windows is far too difficult, even for sophisticated computer users.”
I’m going to agree with Jeff on this one. But I don’t think it much matters how the maximize/zoom button works. The real issue is that we just don’t have a good visual paradigm for dealing with multiple windows. “Tabbed” interfaces help a lot by restricting the windows to the same size and shape. When they’re not appropriate, however, the operating systems should do a MUCH better job of allowing us to manipulate windows and understand what we’re looking at.
Not that I have any solutions for this, but I wanted to at least restate the problem.
Also note that the zoom button doesn’t just zoom out, it usually toggles between zoomed and the previous state. So if you don’t like where it zoomed, just click again, or use it to toggle between your chosen state and auto-zoomed—easy, because the button’s location relative to the window origin means it usually remains under your mouse pointer. There are exceptions, for example in the case of a fully flexible web page layout like Coding Horror, it maximizes the window, regardless of its position.
iTunes’s minimizing zoom button is also an anomaly, but it is an example that demonstrates that different types of content zoom differently.
And please don’t hold up Photoshop to demonstrate the problems with the Mac OS windowing interface. Photoshop has been one of my main Mac applications for years, and windowing has become more frustrating with almost every version. The nadir was Photoshop 7, which usually, but not always, disables the OS shortcut for cycling app windows, and hides all documents in a submenu (and when you quit, it ask you whether you want to save documents which remain hidden behind the frontmost window!).
Multiple visible windows make some sense on the Mac, because drag and drop is so well integrated and standardized. You can drag files, formatted and plain text, images, URLs just about anywhere that makes sense: to document windows, application icons in the Finder or Dock, picture wells in preference panes, web browser’s address bar, window or text field. You can drag a file from the icon in the title bar of any application window, as long as the document is saved. Snap-open folders in the Finder let you drag files and image or text clippings into folders that aren’t currently visible.
There’s lots of standardized UI for handling windows. Minimize them with command-M. Cycle windows of an app with command-tilde, or apps with command-tab. Hide apps with command-H, or other apps with command-option-H (or using the keyboard and mouse on Dock icons). Expos and the anticipated Spaces virtual desktops add more options.
The integration goes beyond the clipboard and drag and drop. The system spellchecker, Command-F, -G, and -E, “Find”, “Find Next”, and “Use Selection for Find”, is another wonderful bit of standardized interapplication UI (but I’m digressing).
(If Office doesn’t have multiple document windows, how do you drag text between docs?)
Some apps are more task-oriented than document-oriented, but I still have the choice to open an email in a separate window in Mail.app, or a playlist in a separate window in iTunes when I choose to. When I quit Mail and relaunch it, the emails I left open remain in the same position and stacking. And Safari 3 lets me restore my workspace (7 windows with 40 tabs this morning), including the position, frontmost tab, and dock-minimized state of each window. Choice and retention of state are good.
I suppose using two or three monitors would help make up for the limitations of an interface oriented towards maximizing single windows.
And if you are reading the Coding Horror comments in a 1900-pixel wide window, you might find it much easier to read by narrowing the window to half the width.
There are some experimental window managers in Linux, that allow for multi-window interfaces while taking care the placement and size of windows in order to optimise screen area usage. Although I’ve never tried it, here’s an example of such a window manager:
Have you ever used eclipse? (www.eclipse.org)? It and certain other multi-window programs don’t have cascade, tile, or even standard ‘drag windows anywhere’ interfaces - instead, your windows MUST ‘fit’ to a certain space in the total area available to you. You can drag it ‘on top of’ another window to add a tab bar to that window so you can switch between the two, or you can drag it towards any corner which will split whatever’s there into two equally sized areas. Whatever you do, you can never make one window overlap another, except overlap 100% (with the tab bar thingie). There’s a LOT more to it than that, but suffice to say:
multiple windows works fine, it’s just the drag/cascade/tile options that suck. Have you EVER used cascade or tile? Have you EVER placed windows haphazardly on the desktop and actually ‘liked it’? Usually you manually ‘snap’ your windows so that none overlap, when and where you do need that sort of thing.
Second point: For a site that explains that good web designers never let their text run the full size of the browser window, it’s funny that you don’t heed this advice
I have two computers and four monitors at work. Two of them are landscape, and two of them are portrait. I use the portrait screens for coding and for reading documents. In both scenarios, I tend to keep my application maximized all the time. Visual Studio is a perfect example.
Typically, all of my other windows live on my landscape monitors, and those are rarely maximized. I keep my taskbar vertical and grouped by type, so I can quickly scan the labels on the taskbar tabs. I rarely use alt-tab. Chances are, if I need to rapidly switch back and forth between two applications, one is on the left screen and one is on the right.
In either resolution, a almost never click the restore/maximize button. I just double-click the title bar to toggle.
At home, I have a 22” widescreen, and I still run Visual Studio maximized. I typically split the pane vertically, so I can see and work on two documents simultaneously. I installed the Vista equivalent of Mac’s Expose. It’s a neat party trick, but I don’t use it as often as I use windows + tab.
As for how the button “should” act, I think it’s totally up to your own preference. I think you’ll learn to adapt to whatever technology you’re using. Why isn’t it a user setting?
I think a good windows manager is all we need. What if your OS had different “panes” that fit into a “layout” and you could easily switch layouts, or change which windows were in each pane? It seems like an interesting project. The hardest part would be making it easy enough to use for the average person.
I have some suggestions that I dont’ understand why none of them are implemented yet on Windows task switching.
Why can’t we have key-bindings for one of the most frequently used task on the computer. Start-1, Start-2 (or better yet configure it per program group example: configure Start-W always tiles all instances of Word)
Why can’t we hide programs to the task manager (even if they aren’t not configured to do so)
Why can’t lock a window to be always on top (if it’s not implemented in the app)
I wouldn’t mind alt-tab so much if I could “put away” all that I’m running but not actively using. Alt tab breaks down a bit once you start using three applications and even with dual monitors I see no reason why I should have to touch my mouse to go between the two windows.
By the way, if you would prefer maximized windows on the Mac, you can just manually resize a window to full-screen in an app—then new windows in that app will be created full-screen. The zoom button will toggle between content size and full-screen size. (Of course it probably won’t work this way in some apps that choose to display fixed-size documents without adding an additional desktop behind them, for example images and text pages formatted for printing)
This is how the zoom button works (I think calling it a “maximize button” reflects a desire to reduce its function). It gives the user choice, possibly even encompassing something that a Windows user could get used to.
“i almost never use the minimize button or alt+tab… if i want to switch, i just use the button for the window on the taskbar… all it takes is 1 quick click
someone said only the mac can do that. not true. windows can too…”
Yes, but it actually works all the time on the Mac. Sometimes under XP, the button just depresses and the window never shows. Other times I click the button on the task bar and the window gets focus, but a window covering the focused window never goes behind the focused window. Have to click several times for the desktop to get un-confused.