[maxer]

my biggest gripe with mac os having recently moved from windows is hitting the maximise button on finder and it barely filling half the screen.

other well documented one is the ability to turn the laptop screen of when using another screen but still the laptop keyboard

[crb]

Hold Shift while hitting the green plus ("resize window") button to make it maximise the window.

[msluyter]

Holy crap! I wish I could give you multiple upvotes for this. I wonder if there's a way to make this the default? This reminds me that I really need to spend a couple of days delving into basic OSX functionality (features/keyboard shortcuts). There are probably a ton of other features like this that I'm oblivious to.

[vbo]

Cheers for that, I've been mildly annoyed with the resize button for years but never enough to look for a solution. This works great.

[Vecrios]

still, doesn't work for me! what version are you using?

[vbo]

Using Lion, but I recall doing this for some time (Tiger?); I may be wrong. Do you have tap to click enabled?

[driverdan]

IIRC it was introduced fairly recently, either Snow Leopard or Lion.

[Angostura]

It is app-dependent too.

[evanmoran]

Holy crap part 2. I've been looking for that for a long time!

[cobralibre]

There is no maximize button in OS X; there's a zoom button. It's used to toggle between a window's "standard" size and position, and a user-defined size and position.

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/UserEx...

Your application determines the initial size and position of a window, which is called the standard state. If the user changes a window's size or location by at least 7 points, the new size and location is the called the user state. The user can toggle between the standard state and the user state by clicking the zoom button in the title bar.

[adambyrtek]

Call it what you like, it's still confusing, and pointing users to documentation is not going to solve the problem.

[tesseract]

It's not confusing, it does the exact same thing it's always done since the 1980s. The zoom button in Windows is horribly broken though - all it ever does is make the window fill the whole screen! How wasteful!...

Considering the number of complaints though, you'd think Apple would introduce a preference setting, or another button or something. And in fact they have - in 10.7 there's a maximize button in the top right corner...

Except the new button is officially called the "fullscreen" button and to hear some people talk, the existence of the fullscreen mode is a foreboding sign of the coming iPad-ification of OS X...

sigh.

[adambyrtek]

Apple is seen as a company that cares about simplicity and user experience. If a feature is confusing to many, mostly because the behavior depends on application and window size, we should expect them to refine it. Claiming that such users are "wrong" because it works fine for somebody who has used Mac for the last 20 years completely misses the point.

[snowwrestler]

One is not more simple than the other. People complain just because the behavior is different from Windows, which is what they are used to.

[uptown]

I use divvy to manage my window sizing. Check it out - there's a free never-ending demo version too.

[chriskelley]

ShiftIt is a great open source alternative for window managing in OSX as well.

https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt

[AdamGibbins]

You can "fix" this by installing Moom http://manytricks.com/moom/

[subwindow]

Moom is great. Having to use a pointing device to manipulate windows is silly. It kind of sucks to pay $5 to get features that really should be part of the OS, but the end result is good.

Shortcuts that I can't live without: Cmd+Shift+Up = Maximize. Cmd+Shift+Left = Move to Left Display (my big monitor). Cmd+Shift+Right = Move to Right Display (my laptop monitor). Cmd+Shift+PgUp/PgDown = Move to top/bottom of screen. Etc, etc.

[jonursenbach]

Divvy is also equally awesome. http://mizage.com/divvy/

[dguaraglia]

I've been usign Moom for about a month now and I can't count the number of times it's saved me from my old gripe with the 'zoom' button.

[kooshball]

I use SizeUp for this.

http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

you can set the keyboard shortcut to maximize the window, or split it left/right like you can in Windows 7. The trial is pretty good, you get a windows to click away everytime the app starts but that's usually it.

[jordanlev]

There's a free utility called "RightZoom" that fixes this -- it works perfectly for me (on 10.5 and 10.6 -- haven't upgraded to Lion yet).

[Thlom]

You'll probably get used to the maximise button. It will expand the window to fit the content. If you realy want fullscreen, use the fullscreen button. I usually have Safari in fullscreen all day. One three finger swipe to swap between desktop and Safari.

[mid]

Moom is your friend http://manytricks.com/moom/