Several months ago, I complained about how Mac OSX’s “zoom” button is extremely inconsistent, and how the internet is full of Apple fanboys who insist that non-maximizing is The One True Way to compute and that you should just live without it, and once you get used to it you’ll like it.
From Apple’s OSX 10.7 ad page:
Full-screen apps. A better way to enjoy the apps you love.
On iPad, every app is displayed full screen, with no distractions, and there’s one easy way to get back to all your other apps. Mac OS X Lion does the same for your desktop. You can bring an app to full screen with one click, switch to another full-screen app with a swipe of the trackpad, and swipe back to the desktop to access your multi-window apps. And systemwide support for full-screen apps makes them bigger and more immersive. So you can concentrate on every detail of your work, or play on a grander scale than ever before.
Keep in mind that “fullscreen” and “maximized” serve exactly the same purpose, as far as productivity applications go.
So to all you people who told me things are better without a maximize button, well, obviously Apple has finally caught up to 1995 and realized it’s better maximized. They even used the word “better”.
Maybe now people will believe me: a maximize button is far better than an inconsistent zoom button.
Real men view their applications through a window with a viewport only a single pixel in height.
Real men view their applications in a high contrast green on black command-line console.
Well, it turns out we are both wrong. Real men transcribe binary output from lamps on a terminal.