[DM-MUG] SizeWell

[Bailey Ford]

Greetings Mac Folk,

I finally found a solution to a long standing Mac frustration of mine and I thought I'd share it with the group. My problem was with the green button at the top of our windows. Apple calls this the 'zoom' button and it is supposed to resize the window to fit its contents. Clicking the 'zoom' button again returns the window to it's previous size. I've always hated this behavior (because the content changes requiring a new zoom and unzooming back to the original size seems counterintuitive). All I really want is something that will maximize the window to be as big as it can be on my screen. Even more infuriating to me is that on a Windows box, the same button does what I want - it maximizes the window. Windows 7 came out with a few new window tricks - including ways to easily make the window fill half the screen (this is handy for setting up windows to drag stuff from one place to another). Nothing could be worse than having Windoze envy, so I broke out the google and started testing fixes.

There are a couple of solutions, but I think SizeWell is the best. It changes the behavior of that green 'zoom' button. By default, holding the shift key will turn the anemic 'zoom to fit' behavior into my desired 'maximize window'. In addition to this, there are keys that will tell the window to fill the right half, left half, top half, or bottom half of the screen. If you like, SizeWell also changes the way that resizing tab in the lower right corner of the window works. By holding down modifier keys, you can resize while retaining the window's height or width, or it's aspect ratio. You can resize the window so that it becomes centered on the screen or you can even resize the window by keeping the lower right corner fixed instead of the upper left corner fixed (this seems like a weird feature to me, but hey). It also has a 'blacklist' feature to ignore any software with which SizeWell conflicts. 

Oh, and it's free. 

If your appetite is whetted for some finely tuned window manipulation, you'll just need to install two things - SIMBL and SizeWell. SIMBL stands for simple bundle loader and it's a way to add code to software. This gave me serious reservations because similar ideas have historically been very buggy. After reading up on it, and using it for a month, I'm please to report 0 compatibility errors or crashes and the reviews back this up. SizeWell itself, looks like a Preference Pane when it's installed.   

SIMBL can be found here:
http://www.culater.net/software/SIMBL/SIMBL.php

SizeWell is here:
http://www.randomapplications.com/extras/sizewell/

Cheers and happy Macin'
-bailey
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