TUAW Tip: Option-clicking the green button

I absolutely loathe maximized windows on any platform. I like to be able to see the desktop behind the window or whatever other windows there are available. I've never actually used the green button for anything because i just manually resize my windows whenever i need to. I find the only useful buttons to be the red and yellow.

LOL, the artical was about clicking option and then the green button but all you need to do is click the green button. hahahahaha. I love bloggers.

In the Finder, option-clicking the Red button will close all open finder windows. Convenient in some situations.«

Cool tip, I had no idea... iTunes will anonoy me no more!

However regarding browsers what I persoanally wish they did was to maximize hieght and then optimize width. By optimize I mean get wide enough to eliminate the scroll bar at the bottom. I'd be happy with this in some other applications too, adobe reader comes to mind... And honestly I'd be ok if the hieght worked the same way, although I'm sure most of the time it'd be the full hieght of the monitor.

I think how one wanst zoom to behave is probably strongly corolated to the number of monitors one has,,,

This is perhaps my biggest gripe with Mac OS. If this green button did one thing: make the app full screen, then we wouldn't have to worry about all these inconsistencies between every app. Just to be different from Windows, we stick to an old myth about how much people multitask (if you're spending more time switching between applications, rather than working in one application at a time then you're probably not being terribly efficient). Trying to explain this green circle to someone who isn't used to it can drive you nuts. "It makes your windows... a different size. Oh.. in iTunes it (used to) make it into a mini player. In calculator it makes it into a scientific calculator. In Safari you'll need to hit this button for each new web page if you want to just see all the content". If you want to keep the green retarded button, then give me one more called Full Screen. Exposé, CMD-Tab and the dock are plenty for my multi-tasking needs.

I've worked on both PCs and Macs for about 15 years (about 5 hrs a day on each). I definitely prefer the Mac. Consistency is definitely one important design area that Windows has us beat, though. Vista's address bar is another thing they have better than us. Windows 7's window docking to screen sides is innovative and useful and I hope Apple puts something similar into OSX. We're all excited about Snow Leopard's Services, but Windows has had contextual services since XP or earlier.

Maximize is kinda useless given todays screen real estate. I've carefully spread out my applications over my two monitors and "never" have to resize any window.
Oh and I have been a Windows-user for years (still am, running VMWare Fusion now because I need Visual Studio, SQL Server Management Studio and the like).

I read some time ago that Microsoft implemented "Maximize" because it was simply too hard to program "Zoom to fit the contents of the window" in time to get to market. Think about how easy "Maximize" would be to program, and how hard "Zoom" would be.

Hmmm... I've just used Command-1, 2 and 3 for so long to switch between modes in Calculator I would have never discovered the Zoom button switch. I freakin' hate the mouse, and I hate any program (other than drawing or gaming) that forces me to use a pointing/clicking device to execute any common operation.

Actually, clicking the Zoom button in Safari will resize the width in
the case where the window is not already wide enough to show the
page. In this case the Zoom button will make the Safari window both wider
and taller.

And, as others have pointed out, Option-clicking the Zoom button makes Safari zoom all its windows at once.

I've said this before, but option-Zoom is supposed to resize a window to fit the current screen. Useful on my MacBook if I've last used a program on an external monitor, because the only way to resize the window is by dragging the bottom-right corner and a window that's too large for the screen prevents you from doing this.