a mac question

Posted on June 2, 2005 by acb

I just got my mother a mac mini (hello mum!) and while I was trying to show her how to make it work, I learnt that I can’t make all the windows zoom properly. Option-green-button causes some windows to expand to fill the free area of the screen, but not, for instance, Appleworks. this is a shame, because it means there’s little point in zooming an Appleworks window to make it easier to read. Am I missing something unobvious?

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5 Responses to a mac question

  1. Jonathan Lundell says:
    June 2, 2005 at 4:45 pm

    The green button (and option green button) appear to be interpreted differently by different applications.

    In Safari, for example, the green button toggles between two sizes that don’t seem to have much to do with the windows’ content, and option-gb does the same to all open windows.

    I’ll ask around and get back to you.

    BTW, I’m finding this page very hard to read. Not enough contrast between the gray text and white text on the gray background (on my TiPB).

  2. acb says:
    June 2, 2005 at 7:11 pm

    Thanks for looking. I would have called the text dark and the background sepia. I did originally have the background colour paler, but disliked it — my own strong preference is for subdued backgrounds and I wanted this one to bleed off one of the sky colours in the picture. I’ll see about changing it. No promisies, though.

  3. Jonathan Lundell says:
    June 3, 2005 at 12:54 am
    Here’s a bit more on window resizing. Nothing specific for AppleWorks, though; sorry.
    The UI guidelines for window zooming (at least back when I was writing them 14 years ago) is that windows should zoom to the size that best shows their content, which is not necessarily the whole screen. This is different than the Windows “Maximize” concept, which is to always fill the whole screen. Safari does take the content into account. It will try to zoom the window wide enough and tall enough to show the current page without scroll bars. (The heuristics for zooming smaller rather than larger are more complicated.)
    (switch topic)

    Problem is, as the background gets lighter, the white text gets harder to read. And some text (eg dates on your main blog page) is considerably lighter, so less readable, than the rest.

    I’m not seeing sepia, but you can never count on consistent color rendition, especially for subtle pastels. I’m seeing a distinct lavender tinge. (But it’s good….)

    …and your blog sw doesn’t honor the blank-line-is-paragraph-break convention inside a blockquote.

  4. acb says:
    June 3, 2005 at 7:11 am

    hmmm. I see what you mean about the pallor. I try to put unimportant information there. But it must be posssible to make it more distinct.

    if I use textile formatting

    then the paragraphs are observed.

    and I always do use textile myself, which starts a block quote par with “bq. “ and a sequence of them with “bq.. “ both placed at the beginning of the first line.

  5. acb says:
    June 9, 2005 at 7:43 am

    Further to the option-zoom: the size to which a window zooms depends on the zoom factor of the text, which is sensible, I suppose, but not obvious. So you have to zoom the text window to some legible size, which hides half the text; then option-zoom. Then it works, sort of.

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