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Comment by russellbeattie | Hacker News Reader

No idea... And a few versions ago Apple changed the maximize button to go full screen, which made it useless for the 95% of us who don't use one app at a time. Minimized windows also used to show up at the bottom of the screen when using "Expose", but then Apple changed the name to "Mission Control" and removed them. Just one more example of them slowly but surely driving its Mac customers away.

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> which made it useless for the 95% of us who don't use one app at a time

I'm actually willing to bet good money that it's the other way around and it's you who is in the minority.

You sure you are not confusing it with iOS? That's where you always have strictly only one app in fullscreen!

(Yes, yes. It is a lame joke. But who uses only one Window at a time? What is the point of that? Though I remember when I used OS X you could swipe left (or right) to switch back to all other apps. So I think that was good enough.)

I use several windows at a time (around 5 in average), but they are all maximized. I just alt-tab and switch workspaces?

But when it is full screen then you can't alt tab, right? You would have to use the shortcut to switch workspaces. Maybe I just remember wrong.

They're talking about a window sized to the maximum space as if you click and dragged its edges out as far as they can go or just used a tool like Divvy.

You're talking about the "fullscreen" feature which I always found very weird. For example, ever forget your video was "fullscreen"ed as you try to alt-tab to it only to realize it's a 4-finger swipe to pull it back up. Making the user have to differentiate will always be bizarre to me.

Ah thanks. Then my iOS analogy didn't work.

It may be a new behavior (I'm not sure), but you can Alt+Tab to and from full screen apps in High Sierra.

That's a very un-Classic-Mac-like way of using windows.

In the olden days, Mac users would tend to have lots of overlapping windows. Dragging anywhere on the window edges would move the window, so it was easy to arrange them as you wanted - almost like shuffling bits of paper on your desktop (strangely enough) and if you wanted to move something out of the way, you could fold it up (window shade). There was no need for maximising or minimising and "zooming" just meant "make this as large as makes sense for this particular document", not "expand to take up all the space on my desktop"

As OSX/macOS has developed, all that document/desktop-style behaviour has been lost.

It depends on the definition of 'at the same time', but I think that many people in a work environment at the very least use an e-mail client and a productivity application at the same time. Also throw in a calendar for good measure.

I think that Apple thought that many regular users would switch to full screen apps on the Mac, combined with Launchpad (it's just like an iPad/iPhone). But virtually all non-tech-savvy Mac users that I know do not use Launchpad, nor fullscreen apps.

I think the problem with Launchpad as with Spotlight search [1] is that they are not very discoverable on the Mac. Having search in an application menu (like recent Windows versions and some Linux desktops) is far more discoverable.

I guess people don't use fullscreen apps because they equate desktops/laptops to the 'WIMP' interface paradigm.

[1] If I received a penny every time I see even experienced Mac users launch applications by clicking on a Dock icon or by navigating to the Applications folder in Finder, rather than using Spotlight, I would be rich.

Only after reading your comment did it occur to me that I should set up applications in the Launchpad the same way I have them organized on my iPhone (or like Win 3.1's "Program Groups" or Start Menu folders) and stop using the Dock to hold the applications I use most often. Maybe that would help keep track of which applications I have open, and where my minimized apps keep going off to!

Speak for yourself. Spaces in macOS is one of the best window management features I've encountered. Of course, it's been common in Linux window managers, but since I use a Mac for work, its a godsend that spaces and multiple desktops is implemented. I'm a developer, and being able to organize my windows and split them (fullscreen isn't limited to one app per screen anymore) is so freaking useful that I feel lost whenever I try to use Windows again.

Hold option/alt as you click the green maximize button to get the old fill-available-space behaviour.

> Minimized windows also used to show up at the bottom of the screen when using "Expose", but then Apple changed the name to "Mission Control" and removed them.

Eh? They still do, as of MacOS 10.13.

use alt-click on the green button.

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