Stupid OS X tricks – window management

I’m still getting used to my Mac, and one of the things I ran into recently drove me nuts. For a company that prides itself on the user experience, Apple sure does drop the ball in odd ways.

My annoyance was window sizing when switching from docked to not-docked on my MacBook. When docked, I’m running on a larger monitor so I have my windows sized to use more real estate. When I go mobile, the windows remain that size, which is far larger than the MacBook’s monitor size.

Here’s the thing though; you have to get to the bottom-right of the window to resize it, which I couldn’t do. iTunes in particular was giving me a headache because none of the tricks I found were working.

Finally, I stumbled onto this page that revealed the fix (someone else found through guessing it appears). It’s simple when you know it (hold Alt while toggling Window > Zoom), but so esoteric to be confounding. (Side note: for other apps, you can switch the dock location to another edge and then back and the windows seem to come back. Again, really? This was the intended UE?)

Anyway, windows now back to their working sizes, but what a stupid thing to have to deal with. At least Windows let’s you grab any side of the window to resize.