I like to run all apps maximized. That way, I can focus on the task at hand and not be distracted by stuff going on in other apps. Also, less clutter = more productivity.
I work on a website and I use two 24" monitors. Firefox maximized on one (Firebug takes up tons of room you know!), and screen (with emacs/terminals/etc) on the other.
I think this is more a personal preference thing than anything else. (And I use my laptop for music and IM, but its usually displaying the Vista enter password screen anyway.)
Don't need to. Look at the workspace of an experienced Mac user (who's using a large-ish display) and you will see that there are almost no maximized apps, and that plenty of different apps share the screenspace at once.
Beginner users (and non-Macheads) hate it, but I've yet to meet a switcher than didn't like it in the end.
It's a matter of paradigms - Windows doesn't really have a lot of inter-app interactions via the default UI, so there's no real need for multiple apps to be visit at once.
I switched to OS X four months ago, and while I think it's a great step forward from Windows, it isn't quite the same as a comprehensive tiling manager. I've used xmonad, and it's a dream -- I just haven't made sufficient time to put up the headache of installing it.
Taking two windows, tiling them side-by-side and maximizing them should be effortless. It shouldn't take a fancy hardware set up nor an expensive investment, and it shouldn't be hassle to install. There's no reason UI widgets I don't need should consume precious real estate when I don't need them.
I keep a copy of the dwm source (with a few relatively inconsequential patches) in the same git repository as my home directory. It's much less trouble to set up, once you get it configured. (I don't really care for Haskell, though.)
I'm a reasonably experienced Mac User - and I have no idea how to tile my windows. Can't find a utility to manage windows. No way in OS X to do it cleanly. It continues to be the most annoying element of my Macintosh experience - particularly as there a number of great tools in Microsoft Windows (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000928.html) - and don't even get me started on the wealth of WM available for Linux.....
Interesting to be reminded of this. I switched a few months back, and it really was a bit painful. I found it hard to concentrate when I could not maximize, and I spent some time trying to find some software that would solve this. By now I had totally forgotten I experienced it as a problem at first.
it is not so much about screen real estate as much as jumping from window to window without a mouse. dwm + vim + vimperator = most productive environment. It is very natural to switch between programs all using the same key bindings.
It is amazing, well not really when you think about it, how much faster you become when you dont have to keep moving your hand(s) off the keyboard.
Every single screenshot there has the content padded by about a meter and a half of empty background, though. Many, many websites have stylesheets that do that by default. The same space would fit a separate browser window with the same amount of content (or an editor, etc.).
Also, many people find text that wraps at roughly 70-80 columns or less easier to read than longer lines. (This is probably why the stylesheets set the column width.)
I used to do everything in fully maximized windows (I was using ratpoison (http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/) at the time), but it seemed to make less and less sense as monitors got larger. A widescreen 22+ inch monitor is practically two page-sized screens side by side.
You don't need to understand them, you just need to know that they exist and there are quite a few of them (us). If you do UI work, design accordingly.
For example: the larger the monitor, the more tabs I can have open on Firefox without having to cycle left and right. I like being able to see all my tabs at once and know where they are.
I also like having Terminal taking up the other monitor, and knowing that it's always there. It's the Terminal monitor. All other applications are minimized, I bring them to the front when I need them and minimize them after. It's like opening and closing the fridge.
Oh yeah, absolutely. It's just that it seems that half an hour of CSS would make it cleaner and I'm surprised that nobody at Twitter finished something on a Friday afternoon and thought "ok, let me clean this up a little bit" instead of starting something else :)
Judging by Twitter's uptime record in the past, they probably have had an experience where someone thought that, started coding, and crashed the whole site.
I like making fun of Twitter as much as the next guy, although in all fairness when I saw this graph I decided to give them a little more credit. They're facing ongoing, unbounded growth. I can't claim to have handled that kind of scaling, let alone handled it without a hitch.
Unlikely, but it would be a cinch to determine the number of letters in the address; do a little creative guessing with that value and you could probably find it. Of course, having an interesting conversation with them would likely be a little harder ;)
It seems a bit half-assed to run these images uncropped... not like they couldn't provide links to the originals.
(a bit OT and negative, but seriously folks...)