Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'How to get the miniature player window in iTunes 9' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
How to get the miniature player window in iTunes 9
Authored by: JaxMyers on Sep 10, '09 08:39:31AM
Regular clicking on the "green dot" in iTunes doesn't seem to function properly for me. In Safari for example, if the window is too small, clicking the green dot makes it larger. In iTunes, clicking the green dot now just sort of makes my iTunes window shift down and to the right (overlapping the dock). No matter whether the window is large or small, clicking the green dot just shifts the entire iTUnes window into my dock. Is that how it is supposed to function? If so it's not very useful.

Check out the screen capture video I made to see what I mean...
http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah7g63d/n/iTunesGreen_mov

[ Reply to This | # ]
How to get the miniature player window in iTunes 9
Authored by: MJCube on Sep 10, '09 09:10:36PM
The concept of the zoom button is that it makes the window either (a) full screen, or (b) just large enough to accommodate its full content. Whether it's (a) or (b) depends on the app; in iTunes 9, and the Finder, it's (b).

Back on the original 512×342 Mac screen I used to resize Finder windows painstakingly by hand to get (b). In System 7, to my delight, they added a zoom box (in the upper right corner) that did it automatically. Gradually the zoom button appeared in more apps, until it was carried over to OS X as standard in all resizable windows.

Now what should happen if you've just clicked the green button and you click it again? In OS X it toggles between "full" (a or b) and the last manual resize/position. This is better than the old System where your careful window positioning could be wiped out with one click. But this toggling can be confusing in a (b)-style app if you've made the window bigger than the content, and you're expecting it to get bigger. Also, if you've moved the window mostly off screen to get it out of the way of something (as I'm seeing more and more inept users do lately), hitting the green button twice will put it right back where it was – which may not look good, but that's the design.

By the way, this change in iTunes 9 merely reverses the behavior of previous versions. We used to have to Option-click to get a real zoom. This is definitely aimed at standardizing the behavior.

[ Reply to This | # ]

How to get the miniature player window in iTunes 9
Authored by: gjw on Sep 16, '09 03:00:07PM

The function of that button is probably one of the more commonly misunderstood elements of the Mac UI. A lot of people think of it, or even call it, the "maximize" button but what it really is, is the "zoom" button. The official behavior of the control is to toggle the window between two positions/sizes. The first is "whatever the user has established by dragging." The second is "whatever the application designer decided was the 'natural' size for the window given the nature of the window and its content." That "natural" size needn't be full-screen, and often that's not appropriate.

iTunes, of course, deviated from that until version 9. Apple's UI guidelines have explicitly acknowledged that deviations are not inherently wrong. They are guidelines, not mandates to be slavishly followed at all turns. What's inherently wrong is gratuitous deviation. I don't believe the prior behavior of iTunes was gratuitous. I think it was a useful behavior and the "correction" is a net loss for the majority of users.



[ Reply to This | # ]