sanctified, on 10 December 2012 - 23:29, said:
Let me introduce you to the OS X fullscreen option. Introduced a year and a half ago and heavily critized by Windows users claiming that desktop guis should not be like tablet guis.
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In the interest of fairness:
1) Yup. Mac OS has offered full screen mode for a little while now. Complaining that it doesn't exist is a little behind the times, but...
2) Mac OS's full screen mode has some shortcomings. In what seems like nothing more than a raging desire to be as unlike every other OS as possible, OS X full screen mode is roughly the same as running a game full screen (all elements of the desktop completely disappear). For people who just want to quickly and easily set an application to take up the maximum available space while allowing access to common OS visual elements, Mac OS didn't exactly deliver, and it really is on par with "tablet mode" as a result.
Also, I *believe* the Mac OS full screen mode must have support coded into each and every application. That is, no applications predating the feature would allow it. It's an application "mode", not simply a view. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Aside: I do realize that it's very difficult to make a maximize equivalent in Mac OS. A window can't really "maximize" in any meaningful way, leaving all common OS visual elements available, due to Mac OS using both a universal menu bar
and the massive-by-default dock. Unifying the two to increase available desktop area would likely never happen for branding reasons, and possibly also because of the no-copy agreement between Apple and Microsoft (a unified menu/appbar is Windows turf, after all).