Q: Dual monitors and fullscreen fiasco, is there a work around?

My post is prob. going to get deleted but I don't care; Nothing has changed in Mountain Lion.

My buddy has the press release version (he works for a blog), I went over to his house and we tried hooking up two displays to his MBP; it's the same exact behavior as it is in Lion.

This is not going to get fixed.

Just to let you all know the list of user complaints is growing:

-> to Apple

Since moving to Lion and hoping that the new full-screen mode would be a nice improvement I find that I cannot use either our imac or mac-mini's in this mode at all.

On the second screen we have either a VM machines or apps which we need to be able to see all day. For example our call-centre telephone system.

When I set any app on the iMac or mini's to full-screen mode, the second monitor only displays the grey cloth background.

This renders the iMac/minis's almost useless for our work. I see that PC's with similar configurations (XP or 7) do not have these problems.

News has it that this bug is not even fixed in mountain-lion.

Can you give me any info before I purchase new equipment?

-Paul White-

I don't know where your problem is. Former Versions of OSX did not even have some fullscreen mode. So just do it like in the good old days an drag the windows manualy.

The problem is that it did, for some applications, allow you to work fullscreen.

You could watch QuickTime videos fullscreen on any display you had connected (without switching the main desktop), for example.

Respectfully, the "problem" has been very well described here and in other discussions. 

To summarize, using Lion's "Full-Screen Apps" in a multi-monitor setup renders all but ONE monitor blank and therefore totally useless. Not a very useful 'feature' for anyone having invested in, or that requires, multiple monitors, to say the least.

In referring to the good old days and dragging windows around I assume your recommendation would be to use the "green button to maximize the window's size" rather than "Full-Screen Apps".

While that'd work, the problem remains that Lion's "Full-Screen Apps" blanks out all monitors but one.

I think folks are quite justified in expecting this new 'feature' of "Full-Screen Apps" to make an application go full screen on the selected monitor while at the same time leaving the other monitors untouched and available for use.

I only hope that PaulWhite's post above, which is a good example of why "Full-Screen Apps" is problematic, is wrong in reporting that the news is that Apple did not fix this in the upcoming new version of OS X Mountain Lion

Does anyone know where we might find definitive information from Apple as to whether Mountain Lion addresses this terrible shortcoming of "Full-Screen Apps"?

Urkle, please read the thread before you post. Your solution appears to be "just don't use fullscreen" which is not overly helpful as this thread is full of people who want to use fullscreen.

You can still watch video full-screen with Lion without switching your "main desktop":

With Quicktime, just drag video window to the monitor you'd like to use and choose View -> Fit to Screen

With VLC (2.0):

1) VLC -> Preferences... Interface > uncheck "Use native fullscreen on OS X Lion"

2) Video > uncheck "Black screens in Fullscreen"

3) Fullscreen Video Device = choose which monitor you want to use

4) SAVE, exit and then re-launch VLC

This is not a "bug" or fiasco.

"Fullscreen" is just not working the exact way certain people want it to.

That's a feature request. Tell Apple:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

This has already been posted getbarret, multiple times.

It works for VLC and some other apps, because VLC, etc. developers took extra time to allow the user to purposely disable the Lion full screen API mode and use their native full screen API.

What about apps that don't have this option?

Developers are supposed to go out of their way to NOT use lion full screen mode and implement their own?

Ridiculous.  There is no end user solution.  The solution needs to come from APPLE.

Blanking out other monitors when an app is running in full screen mode on one monitor is not a feature anyone wants.

This is a bug, as this is the only operating system in the entire world that acts this way.

Windows OS all the way back to NT 4.0?  Doesn't have this problem.

ALL PREVIOUS VERSIONS OF MAC OSX all the way back to OS 9?? 

DOES NOT HAVE THIS PROBLEM!

Well said, NiqueXyZ.  - JamesJM

Even running dual video cards is no help I have 2 ATI 5770's and have tried every possile way run dual monitors and have run into more issues then I can list here. The sad thing is my 5 year old MacBook with Snow Leopard could do this task with ease so I guess its 1 step forward and 15 steps back. I put my second monitor to use hooking it to my 7 year old iMac that the display went out on. Can't do any work on such an old system but atleast it can play Netflix while I'm working.

The other thing that's really annoying is that if your machine ships with lion, downgrading to snow leopard is a huge pain in the ***, and sometimes not even possible.  So you're basically stuck with a "feature" you don't want running an OS you don't want just because you like a particular hardware configuration.

This does *not* happen with PCs.  If you don't want to run Windows 7, that's fine.  Drop down to XP.

Might have to search for drivers but I bet you they are there.

Want to run Linux or Vista instead?  Go for it.

But on a Mac?  No way!  Your mac shipped with 10.7 and you want to run 10.6?  Well sir, you're S.O.L.

So in the interest of getting something that is more configurable on a mac, you're better off buying an older used one!

How insane is that?

We ran into this problem today actually -- a customer has an iMac running 10.6, and we just got an iMac but it's running 10.7 -- we tried to install 10.6 on our iMac and it won't install; so there is actually no possible way for us to duplicate the customer's setup because Apple saw fit to disable us from downgrading the OS.

Urkle, you are missing the point. Maybe you should try and watch the lion announcement made at the time by Steve and the other apple guys.

In that presentation we were told how wonderful the new full screen mode was, what advantages it had and why it was not the same as dragging the screen corners or hitting the green button.

Had I known that there would be problems with dual monitors I would probably not have bothered to upgrade my leopard to lion.I don't need Launchpad and many of the other lion bits and pieces but more real estate in the browser or iPhoto for doing web-development and in pages for working on document layouts sounded great.

So let's just hope apple listens. Surely it can't be working as designed.

-Paul-

*applause* *cheer*

really couldn't have said it better if I tried Paul! I think you have put into a nutshell what everyone who has this issue is thinking!

-MIB

I'm just glad most of the apps I have where I need a full screen mode already do it themselves, the right way.

I can't believe almost a year onwards this problem still exists.  I thought by now Lion would be safe to upgrade to as I assumed the bugs would be sorted out. 

This is a stupid problem to have for a supposed 'advanced' OS!  This seems to negate any benefits that multiple monitors would have.  Being in music, it's very normal to have dual monitors and this actually is a massive step back for some applications.

Please PLEASE Apple, just a checkbox to change this behaviour would mean the world! At this point it's almost worth reverting back to SL (if only I had time to!)!