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

Maximise and Full Screen features both work badly. In fact I would argue Apple have not managed to work out how to maximise a window yet. Don't get me wrong, I love my Apples, but this one area is the most frustrating thing about mac software full stop.

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.

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.

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.

Fullscreen is too little - too late. Apart from the amount of time it takes to animate the swiping to a different screen on a single monitor setup, as you mention, it's useless for multi-monitor.

Ive used RightZoom since the SL days and never looked back. Basically it emulates the Windows maximize button, whichh is mostly what I would use fullscreen for (sure, full screen saves an extra few pixels, but taking a second to go into and out of FS each time - enough already Apple!)

You can't have it both ways - last year anyone using OS X that wanted a maximize or fullscreen button was laughed at for not having the multi-tasking mindset. This year Apple introduces full-screen so that "now you can concentrate on one thing at a time without distractions".

Etienne Maheu wrote:

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.

I can't have it both ways?

Really?

If I use Windows 7 for example, I can run apps in full screen (let's say windows media player) on one monitor, and then on the other monitor, open excel to edit a spreadsheet -- running an app in full screen on one monitor doesn't black out the other monitors -- that's just plain stupid.

If I wanted the other monitors blacked out, there's this thing called a power button on the front of each one -- I could simply push the buttons!

Also the new multitasking system in lion IS good, the problem is very simple and should be an easy fix -- each monitor should have it's own workspaces, and when running a fullscreen app in one workspace, it should not affect the other workspaces. It's not that hard of a concept to grasp, and should not be that hard to fix.

You're forgetting that there is one big difference between a fullscreen app and a maximized app. A fullscreen app is designed to take up all the space so you don't end up with huge blocks of wasted white space everywhere.