> minimize and hide seem to do similar things but I believe that > minimize will make the window smaller, hide keeps it the same size > but puts it behind another window.
This is not quite correct. Minimize is window oriented while Hide is for whole applications. Even for applications using a single window the behavior of the two is a little different. Minimized windows shrink to a document icon in the Dock and drop out of the Command-Tilde cycle list for switching between windows of the current application. In addition to using the Dock, you can also get back to minimized windows through the Window menu. Hiding an application causes all its windows to disappear (including those minimized as document icons in the Dock). Hide will cause some other application to get the focus, minimize does not. You return to hidden applications using Command-Tab or through the Dock. Note that not all applications are 100% consistent with this behavior. For example, some applications only allow a single window and some of those quit when you close its window, but that is not the preferred and expected behavior.
