Re: Resizable windows, zoom buttons, & palettes - a GUI design question

Eric Gorr wrote:

>> If it's like the button bar, I wouldn't worry about ever showing the
>> zoom button.  I can't think of what would constitute the preferred
>> size (which is what the zoom button does; it toggles between preferred
>> and user sizes).  You would trade visual consistency for behavioral
>> inconsistency.
>
>This is interesting. It would seem to imply there is a fixed set of preferred sizes and, if your window's content doesn't fit nicely into this set, then the zoom button shouldn't be there as the user would be unable to predict what it is going to do. So, what preferred sizes have been discovered? I can think of a couple that would be included:

Where Kyle wrote "preferred" the documentation has (at least historically) used "natural." There's not a fixed set of natural sizes. There's the application designer's/developer's notion of what is the sensible size for the window at the time the zoom button is clicked. You can correctly infer from that phrasing that strictly speaking the "natural" size of any given window is not required to be constant. For example the "natural size" of an image-editing window would likely be the size of the image, respecting any current magnification and clamped to the usable area of the screen on which most of the window sits at the time of the click.