Change the behavior of the iTunes zoom button in 9

I don't think iTunes should be treated as "just a music player" anymore nowadays. It is more inline with a "browser" for your libraries. Think iPhoto, Safari, browser type applications. Many people use iTunes daily, mostly for music, but there's a lot of people who use iTunes for more than that. There is absolutely nothing wrong with browsing music with iTunes in its full "browser" window mode. Pick your songs/ playlist and start playing. Close or minimize iTunes. Done. All Macs come with buttons for playing, pause, volume, next / previous track / fastforwarding, etc. Right on your keyboard. So what's the use for the mini-player?

I understand that over all these years some of us might have gotten into habit of using the zoom button for the miniplayer. But are old habits really more important than creating a better user consistency and user experience? Especially for the new user?

For those of you who never use the zoom/green button for other apps, stop being so selfish! You might as well tell Apple to remove the green button on every other app altogether, afterall, it's a useless button to most of you. Apple needs to make better judgement calls and step back into "Thinking Different". If Apple fails to step out of this "old bad habits" realm, we will probably never get to see innovation in UI design for OS X. And that's just wrong.

This is pretty funny. In all the years I've been using OS X (since 10.0) I have never once, not ever, not a single time, actually wanted what the green zoom button does. I never use it, ever, at all, in any app -- EXCEPT iTunes, where it does something useful. I use it there many times every day.

It is the ONLY app where the green button does anything at all useful. Hooray for restoring it.

@kompacter, #28

lil' green works perfectly in Safari—it resizes the window to fit the contents of the webpage without horizontal scrollbars. Love it love it love it.

@all haters
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Goddamn it. It all comes down to how you define user and standard states. Apple got so much user-feedback so quickly and changed it back so quickly that it stands to reason that for many users the preferred window state is the miniplayer—hitting the green button zooms the windows up real big. Hitting it again collapses the window to the essential elements like in all other apps. What is so awfully confusing about that? Absolutely nothing.

Maybe the real problem here is that iTunes doesn't automatically startup in miniplayer mode, if it did it would be more than obvious that a click "makes the shit bigger."

I've been using OS X for 7 years now, and iTunes is the only app I ever use the green button for. Like it or not, at least the mini player offers consistent behavior. It's a crap shoot with any other app. Some don't do anything, some actually do make the window bigger, and then there's Safari (has anyone ever gotten the green button to work right in Safari?)

Hi TJ, you should still write that sonnet and post it here on TUAW. I'm sure quite a few of us (myself) sympathize as well. :)

It was wrong for Apple to change the meaning of a fundamental UI element within a single app (and then, within a specific function) in the first place, so I can't quite understand why they'd break the entire philosophy of 'don't surprise or confuse users' by doing nonstandard things with standard UI elements in the first place. At least there's a way to change it... Hopefully, Apple gets some clue real soon and make the appropriate behavior the default again.

does anal-retentive have a hyphen in it?

seriously, apple figured out that most people liked the green button to mini player behavior.

that's why they are called "guidelines" folks. For those whose very existence is threatened by exceptions and non-conformity, I'd suggest psychological therapy as opposed to obsessing about what this or the other button does or does not do.

I, for one, think of the green button as "makes it smaller, makes it bigger". How small, and how big? I'm happy to let the application decide what's best. I think in itunes's case, the right decision was made in the first place, and I'm glad the new iTunes update reflects this.

Little help please with the termial.app... I tried to apply the script with no luck so far... my guess will be that I 'm missing something in the process, can anyone advise ?

Thanks

The "zoom" button doesn't really zoom anything, anyway. It just resizes the window (sometimes) to fit its contents. Some applications maximize to fill the screen, while others just resize to fit the window contents (which can mean getting larger or smaller). So it's always been somewhat difficult to predict exactly what will happen when you click that green button in any given application.

"Then iTunes 9.0.1 came out and ruined everything. Yes, I said everything! No, you're the one who's overly emotionally attached to a relatively minor UI issue!"

They fixed it.

And you put up a post trying to break it again? Good god.

The "click the Zoom button to invoke the mini player" is just so completely wrong that it beggars belief. Under no circumstances does it make any sense that a function to Zoom (i.e. make bigger) should result in something being made smaller. I can fully appreciate that some people like the Mini Player, and that's fine, but it never should be invoked by the Zoom button.

I now find myself irked that I have to enter a Terminal command in order to make the application work properly. This really is nuts.