Three things I love about OS X

I just bought a new Mac mini this weekend, three things I love about OS X

1. The green plus button, the most broken implantation of maximize on any operating system. Its so broken, you'd think it was designed to do something different if it wasn't for the fact it actually works correctly in Firefox, but that's the only program. In most other programs it feels as tho the green plus button is more of a wild card feature where some completely random function will be preformed on the targeted window. Its different every time. The sense of trill you get every time you click it, not knowing if the windows will maximize, minimize, close, delete itself, or brick the system is really quite exhilarating.

2. I love how you can only re-size a window from the bottom right corner. Other operating systems make it too easy to resize windows, its almost feels like your cheating. In OS X resizing a windows takes skill and cunning, its no simple task, especially after recovering from the chaos of pressing the green plus button a couple times. Its almost makes a game out of what would be a trivial task on another operating system. For hard mode I like to press the green plus button until the windows is actually larger than the screen, which makes it almost impossible to try and resize the window back to a manageable size.

3. I love the font rendering in OS X. Specifically the level of blur factor that no other operating system can imitate. In OS X I don't feel like I'm reading text, but trying to interpret a hidden message from a blur of text. As a person of higher intelligence I enjoy the good mind game from time to time, especially when trying to interpret OS X's blur text while reading the news or email online, normally quite a boring and easy task. I also love how my vision seems relatively sharper after a good 5 minutes squinting at my mac reading text, as if you have been staring through a magnifying glass or wearing somebody else's glasses.

I initially bought a Mac mini as a simple machine to write iOS apps, where I'd use my PC for everything else. Well now it seems I spend more time fixing and tweaking things on the Mac to get xCode to actually install than I ever did on a PC. I think I'm becoming addicting to it. Why just today I've spend 3 hours in a row downloading updates just to have the mac reboot with out installing them, prompting me to download them again before I can install xCode, which should total 6 hours. Time flies when your having fun.

 

Do you you hear violins? I could swear I heard violins?

Would you like some cheese with that wine?

 

Rightzoom will fix that in under a minute.

Resize from all corners and edges are expected in Lion this summer

"As a person of higher intelligence" - I have reason to believe otherwise...

Cool, I'll give you $400 and take the burden of OSX away from you.
P.M. me we'll set something up.

 

1. Thats because it is not a maximize button... go learn what it is.

2. yes.. its really really stupid, but at least they are fixing it in Lion.. it can resize from anywhere

3. I love the font rendering... its always readable... and looks much better than Windows fonts. I hear people complain about that occasionally, but it must come down to personal preference or differences in peoples eyes. Maybe you just have poor settings or are doing something wrong.

 

yep, its hard to use any system very good when you don't have a clue what you are doing... its also always fun to blame Apple for having a horrible internet connection for your machine.

 

This sounds like some 16 year old first-timer in their father's Ferrari Enzo who is bothered by the way the gearbox is difficult to manipulate, the odd pitch of the V-12, and the "horrible" feeling of perforated leather. LOL

Give it time buddy. In a few days, you will laugh at this thread of yours.

 

They are obviously a forum troll. Do not feed the troll, it will eventually go away and leave us alone.

 

I just purchased my first Mac (MBA) end of last week and while I can see your point, it's not really a negative but your preference. Product differentiation is what sets Apple products separate from Microsoft products (also, vice versa) and just about everything you mentioned falls under the context of product differentiation and eventually followed by personal preference.

Don't get me wrong I like my Win 7 setup and would prefer it over a Mac due to business applications and several other applications that are not easily supported by a Mac, but it's like comparing an apple to an orange...their both fruit but everything from their taste to method of eating is different. Personal preference kicks in and helps one pick out which suits them best.

 

C style programming is pretty complex itself. Good luck doing that if the fit content button threw you off that much. To be fair, I actually agree with all your bullet points. That said, I personally have had much better luck with apple updates vs. windows updates, I don't know the source of your problem there.

1. Inconsistent function of the fit-content button. I really dislike that some (many) applications override this function and either maximize the window or perform some completely different function, apple apps are guilty also. I also dislike that there is no full screen button or at least key command. Also, I don't look down on you too much for not knowing that the button isn't a maximize button when the button doesn't act consistently between applications. This may be fixed in Lion (osx 10.7 out this summer)

2. Definitely changed in Lion, and it's a little annoying, but doesn't get in the way of coding for me...

3. Font rendering is definitely lower quality in mac os x vs. windows. The fact that two side-by-side characters may be rendered quite differently pretty much seals the deal for me.

4. Also, mouse acceleration is worse in os x. They use some special acceleration system for the trackpad, and then also use it for any other input device, including a mouse, where 0 acceleration would be much better.

 

after using mac for more then five years i gotto agree that green button IS STUPID. Also, having my dock minimized attempts to resize window with dragging right bottom corner sometimes fail due to dock popping out.

No reason to defend this imo.

 

Thank you for that

In particular, it’s all about the “maximize” button and how it affects the user’s workflow. In Windows, the big rectangular box would maximize a window, causing it to take up all space on the screen except for the taskbar. In Mac OS X, the green “+” button would simply resize the current window to its optimal width and height, taking into consideration the current window contents.

Because it is a simple matter for a OS X user to increase the width of their browser on a case by case basis there is never a need to stretch to full screen. The button that most Windows people assume will expand a window to full screen instead, in OS X, expands or contracts to the documents dimensions. In the case of a browser it expands and contracts to the width of the web page.

In windows, there is no easy way to contract a window view. So, rather than jumping back and forth between window sizes a Windows person would just go full screen and stay there.

So in this case, the Mac user would be used to multitasking, with the slew of windows visible on the desktop, overlapping, and sometimes just peeking from behind the foreground window. The Windows user, on the other hand, tends to work solely on the current window visible in the foreground.


source: Mac vs. Windows – It's All About The "Maximize" Button | ForeverGeek

It's just personal preference, but I actually do love the green '+' button

 

The width of that is somehow always 1000 pixels while most sites (this forum included) would look ok on 1280 or so. Now having 27 inch monitor, 1000 pixels browser isnt exactly what you expect from a "maximize" button.

 

that would make sense, if the green button actually did that. many applications (including apple applications) have other functionality assigned to that button.

 

hmm I actually agree, 1 and 2 are 'fixable' with lion

3. is also true, but from my experience only when you zoom in (with additional software isn't an issue in windows).

 

1 & 2 are perfectly valid points (window resizing isn't as bad as the non-uniformity of the green button though), 3 is, I suspect, an aesthetics issue. Read this: Font smoothing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel rendering - Joel on Software

 

In all honesty, it's true that not all applications follow this rule of 'resizing to best fit'.

some quick examples;

VLC => goes fullscreen
iTunes => switches to mini-player
'open file' screens in OS X => go fullscreen

I mostly use this button for Finder and for Safari, in which cases it resizes the window like I want/expect it to resize.
But it most certainly would be better if all applications/windows (including Apple native stuff) would behave the same when clicking the green button.

Especially because, for me, I would not need an easy way to resize windows by dragging from any corner, as all windows could be set to the most usable size with one click.

Still, I firmly hold on to the 'easier to multi-task with no full-screen windows open'. I just love overlapping windows, with some of the desktop visible as well. And to have this same result in Windows, it's always fickering around with the windows size and hoping that, when re-opening an application/explorer window, it's in the same size you closed it last time. Which is for me one of the most aggrevating flaws in Windows: windows-size is almost never saved correctly. OS X does a much better job at this.

Conclusion: both OS'es are not consistent enough when it comes to window-behaviour

 

Actually iTunes maximizes to full screen with the green button in conjunction with the Option key. So Option(alt)+Green button maximizes to full screen.

 

neither of those results are fit-window-to-content...

 

I don't like Windows' resize window from anywhere. I often end up resizing a window instead of moving it (i.e. dragging title bar) or whatever.

 

And I never said they were. Did you misunderstand when I said "Full Screen"?

 

You quoted a statement and then prefaced with the word 'actually' - this implied a correction, but none was offered. No confusion here, just a solid understanding of English.

 

Uh, thanks Mr. English teacher. I was offering "Help" to the discussion. Are you going to scrutinize me for putting brackets around the word help. It wasn't hard to figure out what I was saying. You sound like you're picking on me. I wasn't here to flame, but instead to help, however you're flaming me. Good grief.

 

Just making it clear, there wasn't any misunderstanding on my part as of yet. Not trying to pick on you.

 

Well that is 2 minutes of my life I will never get back. Thanks OP.

 

The features I like the best have to be in the way the Dock works.

I love playing the little game where you have to guess which of your applications are actually running since there's no notification for it.

I also love that the applications are completely separate from their open files, so when I click on Photoshop the 'window' opens but all of my documents are hidden. Then I get to poke around on the right side of the dock trying to find whatever I was working on. This isn't much of an issue since when I'm using applications like Photoshop I'm not usually working on documents, but rather enjoying the stylized gray OS menus.

Finder works amazing as well. It's a breeze to navigate to InDesign's preference folder three times a day to delete them since InDesign won't launch again. I prefer the 3-pane list system, because it's always helpful to see the folders I'm not currently interested in take up 66% of my working space. It's also great that I can highlight certain documents and folders, it makes it a lot easier to navigate around the hidden index files it creates for every file.

But for me, nothing is better than the gray bar at the top of the screen. It's always there, and always the same color, no matter what my wallpaper is. It reminds me that regardless of how unique I try to be, I'm always just "one of them". It's great to just stare at while I'm waiting 1-2 minutes for my Flash drive actually eject (another amazing feature) or massaging my wrist due to the carpal tunnel syndrome brought on by the ergonomics of the mighty mouse.

 

current OSX shows you what apps are running, because there is a notification for it.... in Lion that notification is hidden by default, but you can re-enable it.

huh? are you talking about minimizing, and finding what you minimized? Change the option to minimize to the app Icon instead of the right side, then clicking and holding on the app Icon will show you all its windows that are minimized to it using an Expose interface. If your just wanting to switch around apps, try using Expose, or Cmd+Tab and Cmd+`

if InDesign is so bad, stop using it... if you really need to get to a folder 3 times a day, why not make a shortcut to that folder so it only takes a click?
3 pane...? you mean column view? try a different view if you don't like it, but how do you expect an OS to read you mind and know what to show you and not show you all the options to choose from? Other than that the statement makes no sense at all.

only if you keep the transparency off, otherwise it'll not be gray since the wallpaper will show through it slightly.
1-2 minutes? what the heck are you doing to make it do that? Mine always take a second or two.
yep, I don't like the Mighty Mouse either.

 

Great, this stupid thread started by a troll has brought in another troll. The whole point of this thread as to push people's buttons and Akari is doing the same thing. I don't even know why this thread now has 3 pages of replies when it should of only had one.

 

how is showing ignorance pushing peoples buttons?

 

Ignorance may be bliss but the sarcasm pushes buttons. Close the thread.

 

The sole purpose of the OP's and Akari's posts have been to provoke people. They weren't here to debate anything in an educated manner. Instead they decided to be extremely sarcastic and point out flaws as if they were benefits. It is clear that the OP was a troll as they were banned. Akari might be joining in because they had 5 minutes they wanted to kill. Either way, the whole point behind their posts was to get people fired up whether they were ignorant or not.

 

Okay, so we are going nowhere, so thread closed.

Also, If you do not want to see certain user's post, then add that user to the ignore system in your usercp.