No, this has been one of the fundamental UI differences between Mac OS (from farther back than OS X) and Windows/Linux. Mac windows can only be resized from the bottom-right, with those other points being used to drag the window around.
The irony being that GNOME 3 has slavishly copied (badly) various Mac OS X "features", one being the inability to resize windows from all sides. And less than a year later, Mac OS X changes to allow resizing from all sides.
The difference is that GNOME 3 still allows you to resize from any point inside the window with Alt-middle-drag. No matter how big your resize border is, it's smaller and more fiddly than 'the entire window'.
I don't think this is true. I'm using GNOME 3 on Fedora 15, and I'm able to resize windows along all 4 edges and 3 of the 4 corners (I can't resize by the close button).
Great snippet from the report summing up all that is wrong w/ GNOME 3 devs:
"I propose to remove the ability to resize a window by the 1px border. The current behavior requires super precise positioning to achieve it willingly, while still poses a good chance to do it accidentally."
Slight correction - pre Mac OSX you could only resize from the bottom right, but you could move a window by dragging from the border on any edge (the idea being that windows were equivalent to pieces of paper, so people would rather move them out of the way rather than resize them, which had no physical analogue). But OSX took a step back - resize from the corner and move from the title bar only.
I haven't owned an Apple since my old IIgs, but from playing around with friends' and Apple Store Macs, I always wondered if there was just a non-obvious way for powerusers to maximize Mac windows for an alt-Tab type window switching workflow.
Now I know there wasn't. Was this ever a pain point for powerusers, especially on laptops, or did you just get used to it?
OS X has always had its own window management protocols, different from full-screen alt-tab but arguably just as good. In Leopard it was all-windows-Expose, activated via mouse flicks to the screen hotcorners. It was great, really natural.
Unfortunately they crippled the feature in Snow Leapard (grid based rather than spatial layout) and did away with it entirely in Lion in favor of Mission Control.
It's really not still there though. Mission Control always groups by app. No way to get an immediate spread of all open windows. Instead you have to explore the bundles of windows grouped by app.
Er, no. Until now I seem to prefer having the windows grouped together. Until now I never encountered a situation where I had to spread apart the groups. I guess it depends on how you use the Mac.
As a power user I never maximized windows (also not convinced about the new full screen mode) but just stacked a gazillion open programs/windows, that I can bring them with a click to the foreground. I also have always Skype/Adium or a terminal/twitter/netnewswire window at the side of the screen open.
Absolutely. My typical workflow is a mixture of full-screen windows and windows that are tiled left-right or top-bottom. For what feels like forever, I have managed this manually (and tediously), but then I found Moom - http://manytricks.com/moom/ - and it made my life easy.
The apps I spend the most time in, Firefox and Emacs, have ways for me to make them cover all the pixels except the menu bar at the top and the Dock at the bottom. In Firefox it is a simple as hitting the maximize ("+", green) button -- and once you do, Firefox remembers your preference next time it opens a new window.
Just got used to it. I reboot very infrequently - once a week, if that - so I setup my windows once and just forget about it. The + button up top means "maximize vertically" in most applications, so that's a start. And in Terminal, it actually maximizes it to the whole screen.
