Your post says 19 comments, it looked like more so I counted. 130. Some authors posted multiple times, but still it looks like more than 19 authors.
Lot of comments about hi-res monitors. I have 19" CRT that I set to 1024 by 768. It will go higher, but then all the stuff on the screen gets smaller. I do not want to have to strain to read this stuff, so I set the resolution where it is comfortable. If I ever go back to code development I hope to obtain triple 20" LCD screens. Pushing those little debug windows around in Visual C++ is a pain.
I don’t really care about “tons of apps”. Fewer is better. Simpler is better. Intel’s Aedit is still the best text editor, even though it has been disowned.
And as for the maximize button? The Windows method suits me fine. I seldom need to see more than one window at a time, so even if the window is too big for the content, it covers up all the stuff I am not interested in, which suits me fine.
wow, people had a lot to say. I wonder if anyone bothers to even read the comments. You know what sucks? the organization of peoples’ comments at the bottom of articles like this. It is worse than the maximization button that does what it is called.
Bigger screens won’t resolve this issue for most. I think normal users think bigger screens mean bigger text. Finally, they can have a “normal” size document to read. Less eye strain. Thus, the glut of cheap, large, low res monitors.
On the Mac it is not called the maximize button, it is called the zoom button. So you complaining about how it works is like complaining about why the French don’t speak English.
It’s all about taste, which basically makes your post into yet another “my way is the best way”-rant.
At work I use Windows, and the Windows UI works best with maximized windows. But I find it not as effective as the Mac window management. It is way less flexible. At home on my Mac, I routinely use the zoom button to zoom the window to its contents, and at the same time I can still see all other open windows in the background. If they are relevant it can be really efficient and I don’t have to do the Alt-Tab dance as I do on Windows. On the other hand if the windows are of no use at the moment I simply do a Hide All and only the current window remain. On Windows you simply don’t have that flexibility so you end up maximizing your windows. It’s waste of screen real estate and Microsoft needs to come up with some better window management - perhaps that their new window management patent I read about yesterday is all about 'cause the way they do it now is so 1988.
Again this is mainly a matter of taste, but after getting used to the Mac I find the UI so much more effective and flexible (I switched to Mac at home last year).
Ditto to the good words of my fellow Macheads. I’m on a Mac at home and Windows at work, and have long been struck by the irony of how weakly the operating system called “Windows” actually deals with windows. Of course, “Switchable Applications That Fill Your Entire Screen” probably wouldn’t have been quite as marketable a name. Hell, maybe someone has it trademarked already.
The thing is, if you’ve got a crappy model for windows - if DD is weakly supported, if one window can cover the menu of another, if it’s not clear which window has the keyboard focus (and as someone above pointed out, the Mac has gotten worse in this last regard of late), etc. - if it’s a weak windowing model, then the best thing for it is an escape out of windowland, and that’s what Maximize gives you. When I’m using Windows, most of my windows are maximized, most of the time. When I’m on my Mac, windows are sized to their contents and I find that much more productive - because I can see content from other documents (including those from other applications) by just glancing, because I can DD, because I can switch directly to the window I want with a click, instead of the alt-tab slot machine.
The Mac windowing model is simply superior for use with multiple windows, and “right-sizing” windows on the Mac allows you to take better advantage of the screen space. “Right-sizing” windows on Windows, for me, means maximizing them, and I’m glad that Microsoft made that easy. I would be happier if they had adopted a better windowing model, and I’m sorry that Windows’ dominance has led so many people (including you, Jeff) to the conclusion that, basically, windows are bad. Windows aren’t bad; bad windows are bad. It’s hard, coming from one paradigm, to appreciate the values of another, and it’s all too easy to overgeneralize. I think that’s what you have done here.
Photoshop is MDI, but it has been for almost 20 years. Would it be MDI if it was designed now?
Photoshop Elements is much closer in idea to non MDI. Lightroom (one of the best desgined apps of the last year) is not an MDI.
Tabbed browsing is the opposite of MDI - you have all your different sized web sites in a windows that can be one size, so you need to maximize or at least need to make it as big as the widest web page.
Maximizing may suck on something like a 2500x1800 display, but is a much better solution on a dual display system (or why not triple display).
I hate how Apple try to enforce their way on Windows. Their system buttons show a ‘maximize’ icon, but work as in OSX. If I am watching a 320x240 video in iTunes how should the maximize button behave? The only practical way would be to switch between a full screen and 320x240, yet it does not do that.
BTW I think the ‘no taste’ concept that Jobs invented is brilliant. It clearly can defend Apple’s choices as always supperior. The reality is different thought - things are designed by different people, experts in their field.
But you should defend the rather strange idea that UI designers at MS suck compared to Apple, that typography experts suck compared to Apple, etc. and not last that Apple have more resources than MS to spend on the OS (which again is not true).
Never used any of those buttons and I have to say I can’t stand them.
The only application which gets maximized is “Lotus Notes” and Visual Studio - and i have to say that I don’t like the UI of those two.
I prefer the Photoshop way - but Windows (sans F9 / F10 for zooming out and selecting a window and showing the desktop - can’t remember the name right now) supports this style very bad.
I wonder if anyone bothers to even read the comments
I read them all. But it’s true that beyond a certain point, comments don’t scale-- TL;DR* syndrome sets in. It’s the same reason students fail to read Nabokov or Tolstoy…
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
Exactly. This post is ultimately not Apple vs. Microsoft; it’s Windows vs. The User. Windowing GUIs are all broken, so it’s a moot point to argue which is more broken than the other.
I wonder if auto-docking panels, on larger monitors, would help at all. Some way for multiple windows to “snap” into standard positions… I’m a little gunshy of this approach based on the implementation in Visual Studio 2005, which is really difficult to use.
“Manipulating windows is pure excise-- extra work that stands between the user and completing their task. The more windows you have to deal with, the less work you get done, and the more time you spend sizing them, moving them, bringing them to the top, and dragging them around so they aren’t overlapping.”
You just perfectly articulated why I chose thumbnails-with-tabs for Paint.NET 3.0’s MDI implementation (as opposed to Photoshop or PSP’s lots-of-child-windows “classic” MDI).
i hae only used mac 4 or 5 times, and i could never figure out what button was for what purpose, colorful buttons dont make any sense to me, may be apple thinks users are babies and candies will remind them of the purpose of each button
The speed of clicking a thing on screen depends on both its size and its distance from your mouse cursor.
An infinite height of a menu bar does not mean infinite width of a menu item. So while you can move your mouse easily to the edge of the screen, it still takes you time to click on a menu item (unlike the start menu in Windows which is in the very corner). And on a larger screen the distance to the menu diminishes the benefits a lot.
one thing i sorely miss from playing with macs… is the abillity to hover over a folder while draggin something, and having it automatically open that folder.
The menubar on OSX is always at the edge of the screen and thus does not involve breaking or exact pointing mechanism. And this is part of Fitts Law. Cluttering all controls close to the current mouse position is not a bullet proof mechanism to increase usability.
iMicrosoft, Sun, and others have made the decision to mount the menu bar on the window, rather than at the top of the display, as Apple did. They made this decision for at least two reasons:
Apple claimed copyright and patent rights on the Apple menu bar
Everyone else assumed that moving the menu bar closer to the user, by putting it at the top of the window, would speed things up.
Phalanxes of lawyers have discussed point 1. Let’s deal with point two. The Apple menu bar is a lot faster than menu bars in windows. Why? Because, since the menu bar lies on a screen edge, it has an infinite height. As a result, Mac users can just throw their mice toward the top of the screen with the assurance that it will never penetrate and disappear./i
mmmm … strange, on the one hand you say that windows shouldn’t be maximised, and on the other that multiple open windows (tiled for example on a huge monitor) is also a no-no.
The only way out of this conundrum would be to never have a monitor with a higher resolution that 1024*768.
"All that money and Gates has never been able to hire a decent human factors person."
I guess that Alex Chamberlain hasn’t read Jensen Harris’ blog posts about Office 2007 UI development that Jeff linked to some time back: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000724.html
I agree in that I prefer the behaviour followed by Windows.
But I disagree about users not being able to track z-order. In most Windows applications z-order corresponds with tab index order. Thus, pressing alt+tab allows you to bounce between windows (not applications as in the apple world). Very very handy when you are proficient with it and the only place where I’ve seen it done as well is gnome.
Apart from openstep, I can’t think of a situation in the Windows 2000 era when things didn’t follow this behaviour consistently. Unfortunately, this aspect of usability has been in decay for some time. Many applications now break this pattern, including Microsoft Excel (it’s clear that Excel used to be a multiple document format and they’ve done a poor job moving away from it). To see what I mean, open two excel Windows, and then tab around to other applications and notice how it doesn’t follow the convention, and the presence of a third excel entry which doesn’t correspond to a visible Window.
Unfortunately the Windows API doesn’t force applications into the mould, and some break the rules from the user’s perspective. For example, there are several applications that minimise to the icon bar rather than the task bar and remain one from the top of the tab index. And there are several applications which just break the rules because they’re rubbish (e.g. Lotus Notes).