Comments on: Is Maximized Window Faster to Use?

By: Vladimir

Vladimir — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 16:47:18 +0000

A not-full-screen window allows you to drag things around, from one window into another and to the desktop and back, as well as to make windows active by just clicking in the window. This is how you use a Mac, and very few PC users do that, cause they are used to full-screen.

As for the Fitts law, it applies to the menu bar, which on Macs is snapped to the very top of the screen, while on PCs it’s separated from the top by the window bar, and the task bar at the bottom also has a couple of pixels between the bottom of the screen and its application ‘buttons’.

Regards!

By: marko

marko — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 18:37:16 +0000

Paul, the charset is sent via HTTP headers, and it’s iso-8859-2, but I’m having my little war with my database, so it’s on the top of my to-do list for this site.

By: Paul D

Paul D — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 17:40:47 +0000

By the way, there seems to be a mismatch between the text encoding of your website and the database it’s storing comments in. Looking at your code, I don’t see any encoding specified at all. Safari assumed it was unicode, but the en dashes I had in that last comment turned into question marks.

By: Paul D

Paul D — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 17:37:53 +0000

One of the first things I noticed after switching to Macs was that I stopped using – or wanting to use – windows in full-screen mode. I find myself being much more productive now than when I treated the OS (either Windows or Linux) like a one-app-at-a-time interface.

And ew, who’d ever want to have a document open full-screen on a cinema display? Unless it’s a video project or something.

By: Patrick Taylor

Patrick Taylor — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 00:36:53 +0000

If you mean “Zoom” then there isn’t a built-in shortcut for it, but if you go into the “Keyboard & Mouse” System Preferences and select the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab, you can create your own.

Click on the + box which will bring up a Dialog box, keep the Application set for “All Applications” unless you just want to add Zoom to one particular app, add Zoom to the Menu Title, and pick the Keyboard Shortcut you want to assign it to (if there are any conflicts with pre-existing Keyboard shortcuts, the pre-existing ones will be the preferred behaviour so pick an easy to type, but uncommon shortcut …).

By: marko

marko — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 14:26:48 +0000

To make things more clear, this is not OSX vs. XP discussion. Just a thought on applications’ interfaces (of any OS). In fact, it was initiated by Roger’s and Hicks’ posts and accompanying comments, where significant number of users stated they prefer a few application windows open side by side. Maybe it’s just my bad habit, but I’m more keen to have an application’s window as large as possible.

By: Jason Beaird

Jason Beaird — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 13:45:27 +0000

I never really need to maximize a window, but one thing that always gets me is resizing a window. Unlike on a PC, the only handle for resizing a window is at the bottom right corner. Sometimes that handle is really tiny and I end up clicking the window below it or selecting an item on the desktop. I still would take OSX over Windows XP any day though.

By: Jens Meiert

Jens Meiert — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 09:51:39 +0000

Somebody actually remembers Fitts’ Law (I last read it when translating Bruce Tognazzini’s “First Principles of Interaction Design”)! You are absolutely right, and I encounter the same “phenomena” everytime I use a Mac, and it is annoying.