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I think I put it best: "Apple likes to make people think they have taste and that they're good at design, but they're actually really, really bad at design and

I think I put it best: "Apple likes to make people think they have taste and that they're good at design, but they're actually really, really bad at design and their tastes are quite obviously very shallow." Windows and all the Linux desktop environments that copied Windows have so much more functionality than the brain-dead macOS that can't even get basic features like window management right. Imagine thinking an OS that won't let you easily maximize or snap application windows is any good?

tapoxi 6y ago
> Imagine thinking an OS that won't let you easily maximize or snap application windows is any good? What's so difficult about clicking the green button (maximizing) or holding it (snapping)?
- toast0 6y ago
  Whatever the green button does is not maximizing.
  - na85 6y ago
    It maximizes on my mac? Do you have some kind of extension installed?
    - eyelidlessness 6y ago
      Option-clicking the green button (usually) maximizes. Full screen in a separate desktop space may resemble maximizing in some ways, but it significantly changes the interaction model when switching between windows, especially when some of the windows are not maximized. Example: 1. Open two apps, at least one of which supporting fullscreen. 2. Open three windows in the app that supports fullscreen. 3. Fullscreen one window. 4. Cmd-tab to the other app. 5. Cmd-tab back to the previous app. If your window from step 3 was maximized (filling the screen in the same desktop space), you would return to that window, but instead you are now looking at some completely random other window that you were not interacting with at all. For people who cmd-tab (and cmd-`) frequently to switch between apps, this is super jarring and not at all what we intended to do.
      - iphone_elegance 6y ago
        I just double tap the titlebar
        eyelidlessness 6y ago
        With years of muscle memory, I reverted this change back to its original behavior (double tap minimizes the window to the Dock).
    - toast0 6y ago
      In my experience, the green button would make things maximum tall, but not maximum wide. I did not have any extensions. As opposed to everywhere else where maximize makes the selected window fill the full amount of windowed area. And I'm reminded by other posters that they changed it to full screening (which is also not maximizing), complete with a disorienting animation, ugh. Pretty happy being Mac free again.
      - pseudalopex 6y ago
        The old way was called "zoom" and would make the window fit the content.
        int_19h 6y ago
        Yeah, but what does it really mean to "fit the content", if it doesn't fit the window at any size, but can reflow horizontally - as in e.g. most webpages? Mac apps seem to prefer increasing the vertical size until the window is as tall as it can be, but for horizontal, they usually stop before they reach full screen width - even if this would fit more content on the screen. It's supposed to be "smart", in a sense that it gives you the largest window size that it considers usable. But that's too subjective an assessment to enable it by default, and even more so to not make it configurable at all.
    - bigyikes 6y ago
      It typically fullscreens apps for me. I think you can hold down option and press the green button for maximization.
  - sjwright 6y ago
    Maximising windows stopped making sense to me after we hit 24 inch widescreen monitors. It’s just not something I ever do anymore.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - tomc1985 6y ago
      That's your preference. Most of my workday is spent writing code in maximized windows.
      - sjwright 6y ago
        Obviously. Everyone is different. Still, that's a common reaction from people who use Windows. I've used both Mac and Windows on a near-daily basis for the past ~30 years. Both have spent roughly equal amounts of time as my dominant platform. My observation is that maximising is such a default behaviour on Windows that most apps seem to be developed with that mode of operation in mind. Whereas Mac apps tend to be developed without that assumption. This in turn influences how people use apps on these respective platforms. I have a smaller vertical monitor next to my main monitor which I full-screen my code editor. It looked weird at first but nothing beats having oodles of vertical space, enough to convey entire blocks of code at a time. And even though it's a verticalised widescreen monitor and a comfortably large font, I still have enough width for almost 150 columns of monospaced text—plenty for my personal coding style. Full-screening code editors on a large horizontal widescreen monitor tends to have no tangible benefit other than to conceal clutter behind a bunch of useless whitespace.
        frosted-flakes 6y ago
        Maximising a code editor allows you to have two editor panes side-by-side. Especially useful for Git diffs.
        sjwright 6y ago
  - Synaesthesia 6y ago
    They really fixed that and in Catalina it works a lot like Windows 10, letting you tile apps side by side in full screen.
quantummkv 6y ago
> Windows and all the Linux desktop environments that copied Windows have so much more functionality than the brain-dead macOS that can't even get basic features like window management right. The window management on macos is light years ahead of anything on Windows. Ever try to deal with full screen windows on either platform? The macos approach is a breeze where fullscreen windows get their own virtual desktop and window chorme, titlebar, dock, etc are managed by the OS consistently. Switching between fullscreen windows and regular windows is sane. Meanwhile, the Windows approach to fullscreen windows is to just draw a borderless window on top of everything. A stupid approach that some linux desktops decided to copy for some reason. > Imagine thinking an OS that won't let you easily maximize or snap application windows is any good? Macos lets you maximize windows easily. Double Click on the titlebar works in most applications. Clicking on the maximize button makes any window a seamless fullscreen window in ways I wish a linux desktop could. Yeah, snapping might not be baked into the OS. But there are 3rd party apps available for this so it is not that big of an issue.
- wayneftw 6y ago
  I like full screen on macOS because I usually get a 2 minute break to read the news while the junior programmer that I'm helping swipes furiously to find the full screen workspace that they lost. Also opening a popout Chrome devtools window on a Mac gets me a break because nobody knows what workspace it ended up in. The reason the macOS pushes full screen by default is because their idiotic UI design takes up way too much vertical space with the useless Dock that isn't even half as useful as the Taskbar, and the awful, ever-present global top menu bar. Honestly, I don't full screen anything on Windows or Linux unless it's a movie that I'm watching, because I don't need to.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    I usually get a 2 minute break to read the news while the junior programmer that I'm helping swipes furiously to find the full screen workspace that they lost. Three-finger swipe up. Click on the desktop most to the right.
    - 6y ago
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Apple of today is like that, Apple of the past was much much better.
danielscrubs 6y ago
For me depth is having emacs keybindings everywhere, support for good fonts and high resolution displays, and great touchpad support. Really basic but important stuff that seem to have been in short supply from other vendors.
asdff 6y ago
You can do those last few things pretty easily, by the way, but the desktop philosophy of macOS is just very different. It functions a lot like a real desk. Things are sized however they are meant to be sized, and you kind of pile them up. I don't line up things on my desk edge to edge maximizing space, its not necessary as some overlap and slop is fine. Apple has a lot of tools with sorta redundant functionality that make it easy to sift through the pile and see everything at once. Three fingers swiped up on the trackpad spreads everything out on your desktop, just like spreading out papers on your desk. It might seem like an issue if you are coming from a tiling window management environment, but over time it becomes quite familiar and intuitive to use because of all the parallels with the physical world and how we interact with physical objects. I have tried the tiling window manager route, and it's more clumsy than anything imo.
- kevincox 6y ago
  I don't line things up on my desk because it is difficult. However using Windows or Linux it is the default and I get to see more. I don't think copying the existing use case blindly makes sense. In some cases it does, and in some cases it may be more intuitive but there is no need to copy the limitations of our past when it is not beneficial.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
  Parallels to the real-world certainly make technology easier to learn, but not necessarily easier to use, and I'd argue it goes against the main benefit of computing - simplifying physical processes through abstraction. You could design a VR environment that lets you walk around your virtual house, open your virtual front door, walk down your virtual driveway to your virtual mailbox, pull out virtual envelopes and open your virtual mail, but you'd just be replicating all the old real world cruft that doesn't matter to achieve your goal. What you really want is just to read some text in an email. I had an older professor in college who still read and replied to all of his email via terminal, and he was multiples faster than those of use that used Gmail, but I remember thinking I'd never devote the time to learn to do things this way when the way I'm used to works just fine. Apple has done a tremendous amount to make technology more approachable, and in doing so has brought millions into the digital age, but I do think the pendulum has swung a bit too far - a monitor isn't a desk, it's a monitor. Too much value is placed on "intuitiveness" these days, and while those real-world parallels might feel nice to interact with, there's a time to disavow ourselves of them to take full-advantage of what the technology can be.
stjo 6y ago
Wasn’t window snapping patented or something
fxtentacle 6y ago
Brilliantly said. There's a whole subtree of people discussing how to maximize a window on OS X, so yes, that surely isn't intuitive.
- asdff 6y ago
  you doubleclick the header.
  - wayneftw 6y ago
    No, that's for "zoom" - which doesn't work the same way for every window (after you enable under the Dock category of the system preferences for some reason). Many windows will zoom to the size of their content only, like the Finder window. Maximize is different.
kagenouta 6y ago
Or that you still call your OS "intuitive" after shuffling keyboard shortcuts around so hard that not only is your OS running a completely different set of hotkeys from everything else you use, but so is every app you used that will run on it. Or after making it a three-key shortcut to take a fucking screenshot.

tapoxi 6y ago

> Imagine thinking an OS that won't let you easily maximize or snap application windows is any good? What's so difficult about clicking the green button (maximizing) or holding it (snapping)?

toast0 6y ago
Whatever the green button does is not maximizing.
- na85 6y ago
  It maximizes on my mac? Do you have some kind of extension installed?
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    Option-clicking the green button (usually) maximizes. Full screen in a separate desktop space may resemble maximizing in some ways, but it significantly changes the interaction model when switching between windows, especially when some of the windows are not maximized. Example: 1. Open two apps, at least one of which supporting fullscreen. 2. Open three windows in the app that supports fullscreen. 3. Fullscreen one window. 4. Cmd-tab to the other app. 5. Cmd-tab back to the previous app. If your window from step 3 was maximized (filling the screen in the same desktop space), you would return to that window, but instead you are now looking at some completely random other window that you were not interacting with at all. For people who cmd-tab (and cmd-`) frequently to switch between apps, this is super jarring and not at all what we intended to do.
    - iphone_elegance 6y ago
      I just double tap the titlebar
      - eyelidlessness 6y ago
        With years of muscle memory, I reverted this change back to its original behavior (double tap minimizes the window to the Dock).
  - toast0 6y ago
    In my experience, the green button would make things maximum tall, but not maximum wide. I did not have any extensions. As opposed to everywhere else where maximize makes the selected window fill the full amount of windowed area. And I'm reminded by other posters that they changed it to full screening (which is also not maximizing), complete with a disorienting animation, ugh. Pretty happy being Mac free again.
    - pseudalopex 6y ago
      The old way was called "zoom" and would make the window fit the content.
      - int_19h 6y ago
        Yeah, but what does it really mean to "fit the content", if it doesn't fit the window at any size, but can reflow horizontally - as in e.g. most webpages? Mac apps seem to prefer increasing the vertical size until the window is as tall as it can be, but for horizontal, they usually stop before they reach full screen width - even if this would fit more content on the screen. It's supposed to be "smart", in a sense that it gives you the largest window size that it considers usable. But that's too subjective an assessment to enable it by default, and even more so to not make it configurable at all.
  - bigyikes 6y ago
    It typically fullscreens apps for me. I think you can hold down option and press the green button for maximization.
- sjwright 6y ago
  Maximising windows stopped making sense to me after we hit 24 inch widescreen monitors. It’s just not something I ever do anymore.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tomc1985 6y ago
    That's your preference. Most of my workday is spent writing code in maximized windows.
    - sjwright 6y ago
      Obviously. Everyone is different. Still, that's a common reaction from people who use Windows. I've used both Mac and Windows on a near-daily basis for the past ~30 years. Both have spent roughly equal amounts of time as my dominant platform. My observation is that maximising is such a default behaviour on Windows that most apps seem to be developed with that mode of operation in mind. Whereas Mac apps tend to be developed without that assumption. This in turn influences how people use apps on these respective platforms. I have a smaller vertical monitor next to my main monitor which I full-screen my code editor. It looked weird at first but nothing beats having oodles of vertical space, enough to convey entire blocks of code at a time. And even though it's a verticalised widescreen monitor and a comfortably large font, I still have enough width for almost 150 columns of monospaced text—plenty for my personal coding style. Full-screening code editors on a large horizontal widescreen monitor tends to have no tangible benefit other than to conceal clutter behind a bunch of useless whitespace.
      - frosted-flakes 6y ago
        Maximising a code editor allows you to have two editor panes side-by-side. Especially useful for Git diffs.
        sjwright 6y ago
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
  They really fixed that and in Catalina it works a lot like Windows 10, letting you tile apps side by side in full screen.

quantummkv 6y ago

> Windows and all the Linux desktop environments that copied Windows have so much more functionality than the brain-dead macOS that can't even get basic features like window management right. The window management on macos is light years ahead of anything on Windows. Ever try to deal with full screen windows on either platform? The macos approach is a breeze where fullscreen windows get their own virtual desktop and window chorme, titlebar, dock, etc are managed by the OS consistently. Switching between fullscreen windows and regular windows is sane. Meanwhile, the Windows approach to fullscreen windows is to just draw a borderless window on top of everything. A stupid approach that some linux desktops decided to copy for some reason. > Imagine thinking an OS that won't let you easily maximize or snap application windows is any good? Macos lets you maximize windows easily. Double Click on the titlebar works in most applications. Clicking on the maximize button makes any window a seamless fullscreen window in ways I wish a linux desktop could. Yeah, snapping might not be baked into the OS. But there are 3rd party apps available for this so it is not that big of an issue.

wayneftw 6y ago
I like full screen on macOS because I usually get a 2 minute break to read the news while the junior programmer that I'm helping swipes furiously to find the full screen workspace that they lost. Also opening a popout Chrome devtools window on a Mac gets me a break because nobody knows what workspace it ended up in. The reason the macOS pushes full screen by default is because their idiotic UI design takes up way too much vertical space with the useless Dock that isn't even half as useful as the Taskbar, and the awful, ever-present global top menu bar. Honestly, I don't full screen anything on Windows or Linux unless it's a movie that I'm watching, because I don't need to.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  I usually get a 2 minute break to read the news while the junior programmer that I'm helping swipes furiously to find the full screen workspace that they lost. Three-finger swipe up. Click on the desktop most to the right.
  - 6y ago

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

Apple of today is like that, Apple of the past was much much better.

danielscrubs 6y ago

For me depth is having emacs keybindings everywhere, support for good fonts and high resolution displays, and great touchpad support. Really basic but important stuff that seem to have been in short supply from other vendors.

asdff 6y ago

You can do those last few things pretty easily, by the way, but the desktop philosophy of macOS is just very different. It functions a lot like a real desk. Things are sized however they are meant to be sized, and you kind of pile them up. I don't line up things on my desk edge to edge maximizing space, its not necessary as some overlap and slop is fine. Apple has a lot of tools with sorta redundant functionality that make it easy to sift through the pile and see everything at once. Three fingers swiped up on the trackpad spreads everything out on your desktop, just like spreading out papers on your desk. It might seem like an issue if you are coming from a tiling window management environment, but over time it becomes quite familiar and intuitive to use because of all the parallels with the physical world and how we interact with physical objects. I have tried the tiling window manager route, and it's more clumsy than anything imo.

kevincox 6y ago
I don't line things up on my desk because it is difficult. However using Windows or Linux it is the default and I get to see more. I don't think copying the existing use case blindly makes sense. In some cases it does, and in some cases it may be more intuitive but there is no need to copy the limitations of our past when it is not beneficial.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
Parallels to the real-world certainly make technology easier to learn, but not necessarily easier to use, and I'd argue it goes against the main benefit of computing - simplifying physical processes through abstraction. You could design a VR environment that lets you walk around your virtual house, open your virtual front door, walk down your virtual driveway to your virtual mailbox, pull out virtual envelopes and open your virtual mail, but you'd just be replicating all the old real world cruft that doesn't matter to achieve your goal. What you really want is just to read some text in an email. I had an older professor in college who still read and replied to all of his email via terminal, and he was multiples faster than those of use that used Gmail, but I remember thinking I'd never devote the time to learn to do things this way when the way I'm used to works just fine. Apple has done a tremendous amount to make technology more approachable, and in doing so has brought millions into the digital age, but I do think the pendulum has swung a bit too far - a monitor isn't a desk, it's a monitor. Too much value is placed on "intuitiveness" these days, and while those real-world parallels might feel nice to interact with, there's a time to disavow ourselves of them to take full-advantage of what the technology can be.

stjo 6y ago

Wasn’t window snapping patented or something

fxtentacle 6y ago

Brilliantly said. There's a whole subtree of people discussing how to maximize a window on OS X, so yes, that surely isn't intuitive.

asdff 6y ago
you doubleclick the header.
- wayneftw 6y ago
  No, that's for "zoom" - which doesn't work the same way for every window (after you enable under the Dock category of the system preferences for some reason). Many windows will zoom to the size of their content only, like the Finder window. Maximize is different.

kagenouta 6y ago

Or that you still call your OS "intuitive" after shuffling keyboard shortcuts around so hard that not only is your OS running a completely different set of hotkeys from everything else you use, but so is every app you used that will run on it. Or after making it a three-key shortcut to take a fucking screenshot.