My solution to that problem was finding an amazing app called "Moom". Makes window management (specially the old problem of "maximizing" windows) extremely easy. Just thought I'd plug it, hope the dev gets some love :)
I use ShiftIt for the same purpose, and it works very well. Though I probably spent more than $10 of my time trying to make it compile nicely with Xcode 4.3 ;)
Now that I've got it working, though, I have to say that there's something almost liberating about being able to make the window take up the whole screen, without having to dick about any more. Every time I do it, I get a slight frisson, imagining myself sticking 2 fingers up at an oncoming army full of tutting, hissing, ponytailed-and-bearded turtlenecked Apple fanboys, all crying out for my head, "Burn the Windows-loving witch!" Well, dear fanboys, screw the lot of you, and dear OS X, screw you too, and that goes for Safari and iTunes as well. Hey, Safari, I just took your window AND MADE IT TAKE UP THE WHOLE GODDAMN SCREEN... and I don't give a fuck how big you thought I needed to have it.
Considering what the Apple brand is supposed to connote, or at least what I thought it was supposed to connote, I find this kind of ironic.
I'm personally partial to SizeUp. Moom's interface is a lot better (its grid system is brilliant), but I can't stand that you can't use it to send windows to other spaces.
