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

Matt Wie wrote:

Excel works perfectly when using multi monitors on Windows. You just have to run two copies of Excel. Once you've done that you just expand each window to fill the screen. I do this every day.

Apple's implementation of full screen / maximise window is a comedy of errors, they just can't get it right.

Generally, you can't get the 2nd copy copy of Windows Excel to open.

The green dot on Lion's iCal, Mail, and iWorks Numbers now functions as a maximize button. It maximizes vertical height and html page width on Lion's Safari and iWorks Pages. This is new and improved.

Generally? What do you mean? By default if you open a new file it will open in the existing copy of Excel, but you simply go Start > Applications > Excel and start a new copy. When it's highlighted, all opened files will open in that instance of Excel.

My point is, it works, and well. Press the expand button and each window snaps to each screen without any fuss. Press F12 or F13 (I can't remember) and you get full screen in IE. Easy. With apple if you try and maximise you get a partial maximisation, if you use full screen your computer starts a full on animation and you lose one monitor. It's completely over engineered and unusable.

On OS X, if you maximise a window, it will resize to show all of it's content, but no more. That way, you don't end up with tons of wasted space on each side of a document, or browser window. This is a lot more useful that the maximise implementation in Windows which will make you lose a lot os screenestates in most applications.

Windows also have the same problem with fullscreen apps than OS X does. When you run a game on Windows, are you still able to interact with your other desktops? Nope! Same thing with media player apps. Stop saying it's better on Windows. Every MDI application on windows force you to keep the child window insinde the main window. Photoshop, Excel, name it, it's the way Windows works. On OS X, those windows are free to move outside of the main application window.

I think that's two win for OS X here. Also, I would have hopped you knew your shortcuts a little better. It's F11 and it is also global for all fullscreen enabled application on Windows. Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer, Photogallery, Windows Media Player, etc...

I don't say that OS X has a better fullscreen more than Windows. I'm just saying it works the exact same way and that it is not good enough for multi-monitor users.

alternatively you can use Quicktive 7 Pro .... its really infuriating

.. but you can open another screen when in full screen by using hte three finger swipe.. might not be perfect but it is a work around.

.. you are definitely a Windows user aren't you?

you can also watch movies in fullscreen on the second screen with the previewmode in lion (same like snow leopard)

select the movie and click on the bottom withe the eye at the finder window

sorry for my english im german 🙂

Err, that's quicklook, so no you really can't use that to watch videos whilst you're doing anything else. Plus, of course, the full screen view in quick look has exactly the same problems previously discussed elsewhere about quicktime and other fullscreen apps.

This is total BS they are not going to fix this at all EVERY PERSON USES DUAL monitors man this pi$$es me off..

Full screen apps are useless for me. I typically full screen apps on one monitor and then use the other monitor as my desktop. For example I full screen consoles, logs files, mail client, browser, video, etc. on one monitor and then use the other monitor for my normal work.

I haven't upgraded my work computer to Lion yet, because it would make full screen apps useless. In fact, on Snow Leopard I can full screen a terminal on one screen and a browser on the other. Way to take a step backwards with Lion...

Jeremy Haile

By mistake I discovered the fix.

I run a MacBook Air and a second monitor when I am in my office, it happens to be above the Air screen.

I was not able to "push" Mail or an Excel spreadsheet to the second screen; I like Mail on top screen and everything else on the laptop screen. It simply would not PUSH up there.

Here is the fix. Open Mail and hit the green dot to maximize it to your mail screen. Then go to the bottom right corner, and drag it in so the window is smaller than the screen. That will NOT allow you to move it to the seond screen yet.

Next, pull the whole window so that it is in the middle of the screen, so that there is blank space on ALL FOUR SIDES of the Mail screen. Let go, then reclick, and then you can drag it to the second monitor.

Not sure why, but this works.

Am I the only one who sees a logical solution to this problem?

Each monitor should be, by default, it's OWN space in "mission control"

Why did apple not think of this?

They are PHYSICALLY seperate spaces, in the real world -- it's 2 or more displays that are completely seperate from each other...so why should they be in the same "virtual" space in the OS? It makes NO sense AT ALL...

I bet if you asked someone with down's syndrome what the proper way to do this would be, they would not even go with apple's solution (lol!).

Anyways, the proper way to do this would be:

"display 1" and "display 2" and so on on top of mission control

and then underneath them, they each have their OWN subset of spaces (desktop 1, desktop 2, etc.) -- and you should not only be able to swap spaces between monitors, but also individual apps.

EDIT:

I just noticed something, when you do a 3 finger swipe up it does recognize that you have two monitors and seperate apps on each monitor...

BUT -- you can't move apps across monitors since they're actually in the same "space" (desktop 1)!

This to me says that the way it was designed was a conscious decision, and mission control \ spaces in lion is aware of multi monitor setups -- they just chose to be dumb about full screen mode.

donebylee wrote:

it was nice to be able to view a Quicktime movie fullscreen on one monitor while continuing to work on the other. Lion makes that impossible.

Anyone know of a work-around or fix for the fullscreen/dual monitor fiasco?

Maybe someone answered this issue for you already (it's a long thread, that I didn't go through entirely), but I thought I'd let you know that one solution (at least for watching quicktimes), is to watch them in Quicktime 7. It retains the Snow Leopard full screen/dual monitor functionality.

Not sure what Apple is smoking that we have to use legacy software to get proper functionality, but there you.

Hey guys, I noticed a lot of you seem to have trouble watching a full screen video on your connected display while continuing to work on your primary monitor. Try MPlayerX, it's a video player you can find in the Mac App store and it let's you do just that. This is the first player that has trumped VLC in my opinon.

If you don't want to use VLC, you can use Quicktime 7, which is also still useful for some other things which don't work with QT10. So this is why apple still offers it to download:

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL923

Open the Settings of QT7 and go to Fullscreen section. Here you can click on the display which you want to use for fullscreen.

The downside: QT7 seems not to support the hardware decoding faetures of new processors/graphic cards for h264 decoding. So on my brand new MBP13" playing a 720p Video in QT10 uses only 6% of one processor core. But in QT7 it uses about 75%. This means the computer consumes more energy, the battery power is eaten up more early and possibly the fan moves faster (louder).

Realy hope apple will fix the usabilty problems in lion fast.