That Little Green Button

You know those three buttons in the top corner of almost every window you use (whether in Mac OS or Microsoft Windows)? The red one is the same for both. Everyone know that clicking this button will close the window. The one with the minus sign (yellow in Mac OS X) is pretty straightforward. You click this one and the window minimizes into the dock. It is the third one (green plus sign in Mac OS X, rectangle shape in Windows) however, which causes most problems. In Windows, this button is a toggle, setting the window to either your screen size or a user-defined window size. In Mac OS X, this is not so simple. In general, this button resizes the window to a 'reasonable' size. This usually means cutting out whitespace on the sides of a window (in a browser or document editing program, for example). In iTunes however, this button changes the window to a "Mini Player". Because this button has so many different conditions and possibilities, it almost seems unpredictable.

As a big fan of screen real estate, I like for my windows to be as large as possible. Because the green button isn't reliable for a full-size toggle, I end up doing a lot of manual clicking-and-dragging from the edge of a window. One day in my Internet travels, I encountered a little tool called Right Zoom (downloadable here) that allows you to mandate the action of the green button.

Using this program allows you to have the green button behave similarly to the maximize button in Windows. You can also set a hot key which, when pressed, allows you to have the green button behave in a specific way. You can also set the green button to perform different ways with different applications.

As soon as I started using Right Zoom, resizing windows was a breeze. The beauty is that you don't even have to worry about the program itself. It's not even like it's a utility. I'd describe it as more like an extension of a system preference pane. All you need to do is download it, set it up how you want and forget about it.

I would recommend this tool for anyone who likes to use as much screen space as possible and likes to keep things simple in the process.