Window Maximize and Zoom

The other day, my friend Eugene and I were discussing zooming and maximizing with regards to window management, as he was looking around for workarounds to maximize windows in OS X. The zooming function in OS X, represented by the green orb button, is the counterpart to the maximizing function in Windows, represented by the maximized square. Yet unlike the parallel "close" and "minimize" functions, "zoom" and "maximize" are not equivalents of each other.

The "maximize" button in Windows expands the current window to fill the entire screen.

Whereas the green "zoom" button on the top left corner of every OS X window toggles between two window sizes. One is set by the developer, most commonly fit-to-content (e.g. Apple applications and most programs), but also fit-to-screen (e.g. Firefox). The other is defined by the user, so if you resize the window to 800 pixels wide and 600 pixels tall, that will be the saved setting whenever you toggle back to the user zoom.

Zoom 1: User-Defined Dimensions

Zoom 2: Fit to Content

This was one of my own habit adjustment hurdles when switching from Windows to OS X, and apparently, it was also one of the most common adjustments users migrating from Windows had to make. Coming from years on the Windows platform, we liked to maximize, maximize, maximize, and apparently it was a common complaint of those migrating from Windows.

And it made sense to me at the time when common screen resolutions were 640x480 or 800x600 or 1024x720, with average webpage widths keeping up with the accepted lowest common denominator of resolutions - less than 640, less than 800...

But as the average screen resolution in the mainstream grew beyond this point, especially with the transition to widescreen aspect ratios, webpage and document widths weren't keeping pace anymore because paragraphs of text become difficult to read after roughly 70 to 80 characters on a single line.

Maximizing a single document to fill a 1920x1200 would mean huge margins of whitespace, which is clearly a waste of screen real estate, which is why the zoom function in OS X I used to dislike has grown on me, as I do find myself frequently wanting to resize windows just enough to see the content before making room for another window on its side.

This is not to say that there won't be times that I'll still want to fill a window to the edges of the screen. Movies may have a full screen mode, but images in Photoshop or lines of code in an IDE are areas where that option would have utility.

User-Defined

Fit to Content

Maximized on a Modern Screen Resolution

Oddly, the pervasiveness of tabbed interfaces in recent years has meant more utility with wider windows, which goes against the grain of maintaining a limited width for readability in a document.

Oh, and if you're wondering what our conclusion was, we liked a third party application RightZoom for OS X, which provided the option to maintain a hybrid zoom/maximize function where one is accessible with an extra modifier key.