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

Smoke monster, Spaces is a separate topic, but you may find some use in 3rd party extensions such as "hyperspaces" and "virtue desktops", which have 3rd party developers who might be responsive to feature requests.

Hyperspaces does indeed allow you to have different desktop patterns. But... it doesn't work with Lion. Shame.

TheSmokeMonster wrote:

Make fullscreen apps simply go fullscreen on the desktop on which fullscreen was called and leave it at that.

if you wanted to do what you are saying, then you simply can stretch the window to the size of your one monitor.

There is a significant difference between a maximized window and an application that is running in fullscreen. Please understand that.

I run 6 extended desktops; the idea of manually having to navigate 12 disparate monitor desktops would add bewildering complexity. If you want an app on a particular monitor to always be there, why not just set that option in the Dock? The behaviour you seem to want (app static on a particular monitor) has existed for years. It's all well and good to say that unlinking spaces would be configurable, but why reinvent the wheel? Mission Control's navigation of desktops is already a huge step behind that of Spaces on SL. Splitting MC to independently control separate monitors as unique virtual desktops is something for which I see little sense. (YMMV and all that, though. Whatever floats yer cork! 🙂)

There is no loss of functionality when you have two monitors as long as, 1) the full-screen app is not forced to the primary display; 2) the act of putting an app fullscreen does not blank other displays; and 3) fullscreen apps are not given their own virtual desktop.

da bishop wrote:

"an alternative to spaces is VirtueDesktops, that may give you some of the features you're looking for."

VirtueDesktops was EoL'd at Tiger. I took a look at the source code, but never did manage to get it to build on Snow Leopard. As far as I understand it, the API hooks required for VirtueDesktops to work were removed in Leopard and later versions.

Somebody should build a killer window manager hack for OSX at this point based upon apple's newer APIs. Various things like the dock, mission control, spaces etc are designed to be ultra-simple, rather than sohphisticated and powerful.

I've never had a problem with using add-ons to get behaviour that suits power users, that's a long standing habit dating back to system 6.

___

If people just want to see a file full-screen, there's a nice Quick Look shortcut of alt-space, which will bring up the document full screen. If documents won't open, there's a good chance you can install a quick look extension which will allow the file to open up.

app static on a particular monitor

It's clear to me now that you have no idea what I'm talking about, but that's OK 🙂

I want mission control static on a particular monitor (whichever monitor your mouse is on), if that makes more sense for you. so I can swipe between a plethora of different applications on one monitor while keeping my workflow on my other. In practice, it would just make sense to anyone with multiple monitors, to be able to use your other monitor, no matter what GUI changes are made. As it sits now, you can't use some of the new features of Lion without first giving up the feature of having multiple displays.

there are a lot of cases where being able to swipe between spaces on just one monitor at a time would make sense to someone and greatly enhance their workflow. Or the ability to have five desktops in one monitor and three in the other. Visually it'll sort of look like two iPads working in unison with each other.

I could see a five finger gesture that could even move aLL the spaces (linked method)! huh! I just thought of that! 🙂

In either case we are most likely talking about two different things so leave me out of your rants 😝. I want to be able to gesture through desktops and apps independent of what monitor I'm on which in turn would take care of any other monitor being blanked out by the linen texture.

There is a large loss of functionality with how Mission Control handles Fullscreen Apps when the user has multiple monitors. And again, my idea also included the old method of a linked/unified desktop.

We've rehashed this topic so many times from so many perspectives that we're starting to say the same things in different ways and then disagreeing with each other. 🙂

OK now I think you're getting it! 🙂

OK... so hypothetically if one were to build a window management extension for Lion and Mountain Lion... what's technically feasible?

Can one switch the menu bar on & off (magic menu)? Can one resize a window outside the screen boundaries (as photoshop has done for years). Can one address spaces (window sets) and dynamically switch the desktop pattern, or draw an image behind the lowest window above the desktop, or replace the desktop with a quartz object? Adding an icon to the menu bar, and then assigning some UI gestures or key commands to these operations... might this be feasible to deliver for somebody skilled in Objective C? This is the option that I'd prefer, an extra layer of window-management. Would be great to have all sorts of handy features –the ability to re-size and reposition windows according to various schemes.

On the other hand, could somebody build a black-fabric banishing extension, allowing full-screen to work in a multi-tasking fashion? If apple's engineers were to put in a terminal easter egg allowing this... that'd be superb.

Magic Menu will switch the menu bar on & off. Auto-hiding the menu bar is just a plist setting.

You could then cook up some applescripts resizing and repositioning windows:

http://www.ithug.com/2007/09/applescript-moving-and-resizing-windows/

http://blog.slaunchaman.com/2008/05/20/resize-your-windows-automatically-for-dif ferent-resolutions/

http://ctrloptcmd.com/archives/536/center-and-resize-window-with-applescript/

Then, you could use Quicksilver to trigger those applescripts with key commands or gestures. http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/index_files/run-applescripts-with-keyboard-shortcuts .php

TheSmokeMonster wrote:

OK now I think you're getting it! 🙂

LOL 😀

Well, I still don't want to unlink my virtual desktops. Each one is its own little ecosystem, e.g., server admin on D1, browsing/e-mail on D2, development on D3. The single-application mode of fullscreen apps in Lion is merely the icing on the cake of the bigger problem for me that is Mission Control. I far prefer the Exposé/Spaces way of doing things. I navigate mostly by hotkeys, e.g., Ctrl-3 to go to Desktop 3 or Ctrl-down_arrow to go from D2 to D5. MC is just one of those things that looks great till you actually try to be efficient with it.

If we're lucky, Apple will come out with Cougar before long. It'll be a return to OS X's glory days. You could consider Cougar as being an older-but-still-hot OS looking for younger hardware. 😉

Enjoy the rest of the weekend, folks.

Oh as for exposé... https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3201688?start=0&tstart=0

da bishop wrote:

Oh as for exposé... https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3201688?start=0&tstart=0

Mate, the brilliance is that therein lay a link that eventually lead to TotalSpaces, which aims to offer a Snow Leopard-like Exposé/Spaces experience. Very interesting. Thanks for that!

Just to be clear, what I meant by "unlinking" monitors would not break functionality that allows you to drag windows from screen to screen or stretch windows across multiple screens -- they would still be "linked" in that respect -- all it would do is prevent a full screen app from doing two things: (1) being made an "icon" in mission control on OTHER displays that are being canvased out (it should still be it's own space on the display it's running in full screen on); this makes absolutely no sense to me as to why it's an icon on display(s) it's not even running on and (2) as a consequence of this, the other displays don't get canvased out.

So basically in a simpler terminology -- prevent full screen apps from taking up more than one physical display, and more than one virtual space.

Or if you understand it better this way -- make spaces in mission control unique to each monitor. As of right now, they're exactly the same -- you make a space on monitor 1, it's getting made on every single monitor connected to the mac.

What I really meant by linked is that when an app runs in full screen, it makes itself full screen on every display connected to the mac!

And not only the stupid canvas pattern, but it adds itself to mission control on EVERY display, even though the app's content is really only running on one display.

To the discussion group moderator(s) (AKA "Host"),

I went back to this group to re-read a posting by "da bishop" and instead of the content I was interested in I see;

<Edited By Host>

Would you please be kind enough to provide a pointer to the specific policies governing use of these groups to help me understand what I can and cannot say in these dicsussions. I don't wish to inadvertently say something, or mention a 'forbidden' product name, etc., etc., that would result in the deletion of all, or part, of any contribution I might make here.

I have not been able to find these policies and I assume they must exist to justify the "<Edited By Host>" in some of the above contrbutions. The URL(s) to those policies would be most helpful.

Thank you very much.

Here is the Terms of Use:

https://discussions.apple.com/static/apple/tutorial/tou.html

Often posts are edited for either revealing personal information, providing links to inappropriate web sites or a variety of other reasons that violate the terms of use. Please let me know if you have any specific questions. Thank you.

On a related note, does anyone know of a multi-monitor menubar program that works with Lion and Spaces? I have 3 monitors (iMac + 2 DP), which I'm treating as one big monitor and not trying to run anything fullscreen! However, I would like to have menubars on each so I don't have to move the mouse about 4 feet from screen to screen. I was using secondbar, but it doesn't seem to handle 3 screens and gets confused by Spaces.

Thanks!