[benz]

as i am a switcher, i really appreciate the Mac system,
but can i set a default of maximizing the windows to full screen in Panther OS? as from PC we can click the right upper corner button, then windows can maximize, which could do much help ,esp. in browsing documents.thanks

[madmacgames]

hello... I am a recent switcher too...

you can use the green button on a window to make it as wide as it needs to be to display the full width of the contents...

trust me when I say this, after a couple weeks, you won't believe you ever thought maximizing windows was a good idea... it wastes soo much space and is completely unnecessary.

I used to maximize all the time in windows... dunno what I was thinking... hang in there. Once you get through the "transition phase" you'll never look back and wonder why we did some of the things we did on windows.

[bmedina]

Yes, it really is a waste of space to run things full screen, with a few exceptions, of course. However, the official way to maximize windows is to option-click the green widget. This requires the application to support this, so it doesn't work everywhere.

[neilw]

While the concept of the Mac's window-maximize button is sound, in operation it suffers badly from being far too unreliable and upredictable. Sometimes it's great, and others it just makes you crazy. For that reason, I declare it to be brain-damaged.

I can give specific examples if you like, but for now suffice to say that I encounter situations all the time where the green button does not do what I want or expect. Problems seem to stem from these areas:

1) The button does not show state. You can't tell if the app thinks it's in the optimum-sized state or not. As a result, you often don't know what it's going to do when you click it.

2) Implementation seems highly application-dependent, which pretty much guarantees that it will always be inconsistent across the platform. Safari *mostly* does things correctly (but not always). Preview, on the other hand, sets the optimal size of the window too small, leaving scroll bars even though you don't want them. That means you have to manually adjust the window size after green buttoning.

3) Option-click on the green button, is not even close to being universally implemented, even among Apple apps. Option click a window, and you don't know what's going to happen. Crapshoot!

This all adds up to a bad implementation of a good idea. I wish Apple would do some work in this area (but I'm not sure if they even consider it a problem... time to send Apple some feedback again.... )