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

Well, thing is that by taking out the the menu bar and a few bits of window header chrome, you gain screen space. It is more "full" than windowed mode.

However, if all but one of your multiple screens goes black, that's hardly "full", it's less than half. So full screen is hardly fulfilling fullness in that case, especially considering that those people who use multiple screens clearly care the most about screen real estate.

True, doesn't change the fact Full Screenis currently borked though.

My friend has a Xeon Mac Pro that he needed to forcefully hack the device ID of to run ML. It runs great, but Apple didn't want it to. It's not looking good for him or his £2500 investment when Mavericks comes out. Funnily enough, he runs Microsoft RDC in Full Screen on ONE of his 3 Apple displays whilst using the other two for FileMaker Pro. As it should be. Two of these would be useless on a Mac VNC connection...and they are Apple screens. Go figure - RDC crashes every time on the way out, but it STILL works better than the Mac's built in alternative 🙂

here's a good analogy. The window frames on your house obstruct some light/view, so a special invention can make the window an unobstructed frameless portal. However, if you do that, then all your other windows develop blackout curtains?

I don't know about firing people, but somebody definitely needs a slap for that sort of thinking. Throw a Newton MessagePad at them I've heard is the traditional protocol for such blunders.

Maybe they ran out of back-stock of MessagePads.

Csound1 wrote:

... we are just users like you, what do you expect us to do?

There's only two groups of people in the world that call their customers "users": the IT industry and drugs pushers.

I've not been at the Kool Aid so for me the pathetic waste of space that is full screen is beyond contempt. I resent having to pay for an Apple fix to something they broke.

Glennny2Lappies wrote:

Csound1 wrote:

... we are just users like you, what do you expect us to do?

There's only two groups of people in the world that call their customers "users": the IT industry and drugs pushers.

I'll ignore your insulting comments and mark you down as Futzak.

Csound1 wrote:

If you can run ML then it is likely that you will be able to run Mavericks

An Early-2008 MacBook4,1 EOLs at Lion. On that machine, regardless of how improved full-screen and dual monitors on Mavericks is, Lion is still a problem. It's great when a solution costs $29 to fix. When it costs several thousand dollars, not so great.

I FOUND AN AWESOME and EASY FIX!!!! (Well, work-around)... Find the movie file on the HD (not the icon in iTunes)... then Drag and Drop it into the URL bar of Safari. Then it will let you PLAY FULL SCREEN!!!

I looks for hrs and hrs on the internet, and stumbled on this fix on my own.

This is working really good for me. PLEASE like if this helped you. Sometimes it works in Firefox or Chrome, but I found that it works best in Safari.

Enjoy!

This assumes you're trying to play a video. What if I want to display a spreadsheet full-screen on a connected projector while looking at a different document on my Macbook screen? Why do so many people think the only problem with 10.7/8 full-screen support has to do with watching movies?

Anyway, Apple has already shown that they're fixing this in 10.9. And, unless there's stuff they haven't told us, totally breaking the currently working parts of multi-monitor support 😟 From what they've shown, not only can the screens switch spaces independently, but they have to switch screens independently so you can't treat 2 monitors as one big monitor anymore.

There are many times when I want it to work the way that it does - and other when I want it to work the way they're changing it to. At least with 4k monitors getting a lot cheaper (Seiki 39" for $700!), in my next upgrade I'll just have one big screen and not have to worry about how Apple thinks multiple monitors should work!

David

I just have to put my say in there. This no multiple display full screen business is total crap. I don't know anybody that likes it. As a developer who works mostly from the terminal and in a browser window, I'd really like to fullscreen chrome in one display and iTerm2 in the other and just shoot my way around the OS with keyboard shortcuts, but I'm stuck with the chrome tabs and address bar and the apple taskbar taking up unnecessary space at the top. A lot of the developers in my area have just waved the white flag and gotten rid of their second monitor.

I don't know what Apple was thinking when they made this design decision. I can see where this would be a pain for graphics designers who want to have their editing tool on one monitor and their video on the other. Web developers want their coding environment on one display and the browser on the other. I'd imagine mobile developers would want the iOS virtual machine on one monitor and their coding environment on the other. The average user I'm sure would benefit from being able to have something up on the second monitor, as well.

Apple, I like OS X, but this was a pretty bad design. Fix it in the next release.

I read about what will be introduced with Mavericks after I posted here. 100% approval on the multi-display in fullscreen support 😀. I guess there are some people that won't like different spaces per monitor, but I sort of prefer that DWM-ish behavior.

Now, if only I could have a tiling window manager like DWM or XMonad... but THAT is picking nits.

Mavericks even remembers where the windows were when you re-attach the second monitor !

It politely puts every thing back there on the second monitor for you.

Swiping between dual screen workspaces on two 27" displays always was a bit nauseating.

I think I will stop following this thread at long last :-)

hedefalk wrote:

The rules seem to be: when cmd-tabbing to an app, only if there is only a window for this app on the currently full screened screen, switch away the full screen and show this window. So as long as I have a Chrome window on my right screen I can NEVER get my IDE to move away and show the Chrome window on my left. Borked.

What about Cmd-` to cycle between Chrome windows once that app has focus? That's about the only thing I can think of that might help.

Edited to add: *FACEPALM* I just noticed that you wrote "get my IDE to move away and show the Chrome window on my left". The IDE is on an entirely different desktop than the Chrome window. That's how fullscreen mode is implemented: The windowed app going to fullscreen switches to an entirely different desktop. If you view your desktops from Mission Control, you'll see your Chrome windows still sitting where they were, but the IDE in fullscreen has its own desktop all to itself. At least, that's the behaviour on Lion and Mountain Lion. My apologies if Mavericks has changed the fullscreen behaviour.

Trane Francks wrote:

The windowed app going to fullscreen switches to an entirely different desktop. If you view your desktops from Mission Control, you'll see your Chrome windows still sitting where they were, but the IDE in fullscreen has its own desktop all to itself. At least, that's the behaviour on Lion and Mountain Lion. My apologies if Mavericks has changed the fullscreen behaviour.

Yeah, the problem is that I can't get to my left Chrome window even if I try to middle-jump to the right Chrome window first. Trying cmd-´ (it's cmd-< on sv_SE though) just toggles between the Chrome windows on my right screen. It's like my left Chrome window never existed until I close down the full screen mode on my IDE.

hedefalk wrote:

Trane Francks wrote:

The windowed app going to fullscreen switches to an entirely different desktop. If you view your desktops from Mission Control, you'll see your Chrome windows still sitting where they were, but the IDE in fullscreen has its own desktop all to itself. At least, that's the behaviour on Lion and Mountain Lion. My apologies if Mavericks has changed the fullscreen behaviour.

Yeah, the problem is that I can't get to my left Chrome window even if I try to middle-jump to the right Chrome window first. Trying cmd-´ (it's cmd-< on sv_SE though) just toggles between the Chrome windows on my right screen. It's like my left Chrome window never existed until I close down the full screen mode on my IDE.

That's because that key combination doesn't switch between desktops; it only cycles through the applications on the current desktops. And that's the problem with Apple's implementation of fullscreen for me: Putting an app fullscreen causes it to open a new desktop on which to display in fullscreen mode. When you exit fullscreen mode, it goes back to its original, windowed desktop and then deletes the fullscreen desktop from Mission Control.

All in all, not a very good solution. Sorry for your pain, and I'm sorry to hear that even Mavericks doesn't fix the problem.

Question for you: When you switch desktops, do both monitors change or is it only just the monitor that has application focus. I heard that Mavericks would decouple the extended desktops and treat each monitor separately. Personally, I hope that's not the case.

Trane Francks wrote:

Question for you: When you switch desktops, do both monitors change or is it only just the monitor that has application focus. I heard that Mavericks would decouple the extended desktops and treat each monitor separately. Personally, I hope that's not the case.

The answer is "it depends." It depends on whether your Mission Control option "Displays have separate Spaces" is turned on or off.

Personally I think the full-screen situation has improved greatly in Mavericks.