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by jinonoel 2899 days ago
I really miss the top-right button in classic Finder windows, the one that resizes the window to just the right size to show all it's contents.
2 comments

The zoom button (option-click the green traffic light button, or double-click the title bar) in the (current) macOS finder is still supposed to do that, if Finder's in its "spatial" mode (turn off the toolbar and, optionally, switch to view "as Icons"-- back in the day, there was a window control that did this in one step).

It's actually broken in current macOS, though-- using the zoom button on a Finder window ends up forcing some of the content underneath the title bar where you can't reach it. Guess that shows how much attention Apple's putting into the "little details" of their operating systems these days (very little, it seems).

i find that fascinating... this is the kind of thing certain builder philosophy would say "no user would ever notice", but users do notice and it bugs them.

meanwhile, we can also get an insight into the internal social dynamics of a corporation by looking at it's products. the people who cared about this type of 'little detail' have lost influence inside the organization - they are not being hired, not being promoted, not being retained, and not being listened to. but those kind of people did used to be there. so what happened to them?

its kind of fascinating, like some kind of corporate sociology based solely on research of artefacts left behind by the corporate culture.

It's been broken since at least 10.9.2, in early 2014, as that's when I reported it to Apple (#16701760), and probably a lot longer than that, as it was duped to a much lower numbered bug (#10295866).
I also miss the destructive button being on the opposite side of the window from the non destructive button. In many ways, classic Mac OS was more thoughtful and usable than OSX.
Microsoft and NeXT both had to throw out some good ideas and break existing conventions so that their user interfaces wouldn't have to come with royalty payments to Apple. Since GUI design and GUI IP law were both relatively immature in the 1980s, it was virtually guaranteed that we would end up with regrettable fragmentation instead of a coalescing of all the best ideas.
It didn't seem to be a problem for GEM for some reason though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gem_11_Desktop.png