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But does the maximized window fill up the entire screen? That's one of my gripes for OSX as well.

Why would one want to fill up the entire screen? The desktop is as much of a tool as any toolbar. It's a bit difficult to explain in text, but dragging and dropping to the desktop, or other applications is a core concept of the OS. Filling up the entire screen makes absolutely no sense in that paradigm.

For me it comes down to personal taste I guess...I'm used to having all of my windows maximized on XP and using keyboard shortcuts to navigate around (i.e. to copy something to the desktop, ctrl-c, win-d, ctrl-v).

Occasionally I'll tile windows, or stack them...but most of the time I want them full screen.

Btw, my background is grew up on OS7 & 8, switched to Windows (and still use it most of the time for work related stuff...software developer) but just recently went back to OSX for my casual stuff. I don't care to see much desktop :-).

"Why would one want to fill up the entire screen? The desktop is as much of a tool as any toolbar."

You have obviously never used a modern IDE, Eclipse for example. Eclipse will use as much screen real estate as you can throw at it, and puts it to good use.

As for drag and drop - I never use it with the desktop. I have a few applications I launch from the desktop, most others I get from the start menu or quick launch bar. I never drag documents onto application icons - it's just easier to run the app and open the files from within - you get more predictable results as well.

Well maximize works a little different on OS X and for good reason. You only have to resize a window once, and the OS remembers that size and that is the size it uses for maximizing.

This might sound dumb and not what you are use to, but remember you are viewing from your system setup only. For people with large screen, 20"+ maximizing to fullscreen is useless. (Most apps don't need that much screen space. (I know there are some.))

So your gripe is more a personal preference than a problem with the OS, and people can argue personal preferences all day.

Interesting read on Mac OS X's "maximize":

"Apple's philosophy is that a maximized environment is inherently inefficent since it makes dragging content from one window to another cumbersome (see Drag & Drop). Many types of documents are vertically oriented (like a printed page), yet monitors are wider than they are tall. So, for instance, it doesn't make sense for a word processing document to fill the width of the screen.

The zoom button toggles its window between 2 states, the standard state and the user state. The standard state is determined by the application developer. Apple's Human Interface Guidelines provide this sensible direction to programmers for deciding the standard state of a window:

"Don't assume that the standard state should be as large as possible; some monitors are much larger than the useful size for a window."

Individual users determine the user state of their window by manually resizing it; the zoom button will then toggle between these two states.

While Apple's concept works in theory, it does lead to some issues in practice. The zoom button is always green, and always displays a plus sign when you move your mouse over it. Yet, because of its very purpose (to switch between two window states), one window state is always smaller in size than the other. This can lead to some confusion, since it is counterintuitive to have a window shrink in size when you click a button with a plus icon on it (and a minus icon is already used for a window's minimize button).

Furthermore, if you want a window to fill the entire screen, you will need to manually resize it yourself (unless the application developer has provided a full-screen window as the standard state)."

But does the maximized window fill up the entire screen? That's one of my gripes for OSX as well.

iMacs and Apple displays are wide-screen. It makes more sense to proportionally enlarge until the vertical limit is reached (height) thus leaving some space on the horizontal (width) for such displays.