Thursday, January 14, 2010

Window resizing - OS X vs. XP

On XP I can get "stuck windows" when I move my laptop between displays. These are windows that I can't resize, because they're too large for me to reach the right lower corner. (I think there are other causes of stuck windows.)

On OS X if I click the green "right size" button windows resize to fit the screen -- without going full screen. So they don't get stuck.

It's a small feature, but the sum of these small things is part of what makes Apple products a pleasure to use.

Alas, as is common these days, there are signs of regression to the lowest common denominator. iTunes doesn't work properly, and when Apple tried to make the "right size" button work correctly users rebelled and Apple reverted to the bad behavior (it creates a mini-player instead, you have to option-click to get it to work). Many apps uses to try to guess how to best use the display surface, but now they fill the screen -- which is absurd on a 27" monitor.

Does Windows 7 do anything clever here, or is stuck in the XP world?
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1 comment:

Andrew W said...

In Win7 you can drag a full-screen window. It also shrinks the window a little bit when you start dragging. So full-screen is no longer as "modal" as it was in XP.

You can also drag a window to the top edge of your screen and it maximizes. Drag to the left or right edge to maximize to the left/right halves of the screen, respectively.

My "muscle memory" isn't there for some of these tricks, but it's good to know the features are there as XP becomes less important in my life.