Is Maximized Window Faster to Use?
When started using Macs, my main issue was lack of maximizing applications’ windows control. At the time of this writing I still haven’t found the maximize shortcut, so if there is one, I’d be happy to know about it.
In Usable GUI Design: A Quick Guide for F/OSS Developers, the author summarizes Fitts’ law:
- Make commonly used controls larger and distinctive.
- Use the edges and corners of the screen to make your controls virtually infinite.
- Never, ever put controls 1 pixel away from a screen edge or corner.
In Mac browsers, window controls are anything but virtually infinite (they are even not anywhere near a screen corners or edges). What’s more, there’s no easy and obvious way to resize the window to occupy the whole screen. Scrolling up and down through a web page could be performed by scrolling the mouse wheel, if the default mouse would have one.
If applications’ window is maximized (and controls are virtually infinite), one can move mouse pointer really fast to a corner or edge of the screen – and perform the desired action pretty quickly.
Sure, experienced users usually use a keyboard to navigate through an application, but from my point of view – being user-friendly is mostly about making unexperienced users’ life easier. Power-users will customize their preferences anyway.
8 Comments
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.
Comment (#) by Jens Meiert — 5th September 2005.
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.
Comment (#) by Jason Beaird — 5th September 2005.
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.
Comment (#) by marko — 5th September 2005.
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 …).
Comment (#) by Patrick Taylor — 6th September 2005.
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.
Comment (#) by Paul D — 13th September 2005.
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.
Comment (#) by Paul D — 13th September 2005.
Paul, the charset is sent via
HTTPheaders, and it’siso-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.Comment (#) by marko — 13th September 2005.
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!
Comment (#) by Vladimir — 21st September 2005.
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