Zoom done right

I’ve been using Macs for many years, but have never been able to figure out the point of the green button in the top left of every window — the one that turns into a plus sign when you hover over it.

It’s called the zoom button, and here’s how Apple defines it: “A control that toggles a window between its standard state and its user state.”

In reality, it seems to change the window size seemingly at random. There may be a way of using it properly, but if there is, it is non-intuitive and really not worthy of the Mac experience. Consequently, I never use it.

Or at least I didn’t until I ran across a handy little utility called RightZoom. At last I know exactly what will happen every time I click the zoom button. It toggles between full screen (avoiding the dock) and whatever size it was before. Stunningly simple and actually useful.

You can download it from Blazing Tools — scroll to the bottom of the page.

date posted Posted Sunday, August 16, 2009 in

Share   

Comments are open

  1. The zoom button swaps between user controlled size and the width of the site/page/etc. Making the window any larger is a waste of usable screen space for multitasking.

    Martin Phipps

  2. On a similar vein I have been trying to increase the font sizes used in the Finder over and beyond the large icons and 16 pt text size. Anyone know of any free utility that does this? Thanks.

    George

  3. I have always been a Mac user and still uses Macs at home, but for the last 5 years or so I have been stuck using Windows XP at work.

    Sorry to say, Fanboys, there are definitely some things I like better about XP, and the window zoom button is one of them. I find that when I am on a Mac, I spend an inordinate amount of time resizing windows. Unless you have a hi-res widescreen monitor (I suppose we all will soon), it is rarely useful to view two Applications at the same time, side by side. What I tend to want to do all of the time is maximize whatever I am looking at to take full advantage of the screen width.

    RightZoom helps in many cases, but not in iTunes, because iTunes hijacks the “minimize” button to switch to mini-player mode. So I am still resizing windows constantly in iTunes.

    Not for nothing, resizing windows to take full advantage of the screen size can be a hassle when the Dock starts to interfere.

    Ryan Biggs

  4. Shouldn’t this zoom button have already had this feature? Or at least have an option in the system preferences?

    Because when I used windows I never recall thinking “You know what, they should make you manually make windows full size, and sometimes the maximize button just shouldn’t do anything at all”.
    Michael Miller





Make links like this: "Your choice of text":http://www.example.com
Learn more about Textile markup

  

Previous:
Next: