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

Right, it's designed to take up all the space on ONE monitor.

Why would it take up all the space across all the monitors that you use?

That's silly!

I feel really bad for the people who bought those super expensive thunderbolt displays -- let's say they have two of them along with the laptop's own display...if you're watching a quicktime movie in full screen on one display, it blacks out the rest...Seriously, lol. This is roflcopter material...Someone just spent 2000$ on two screen that get blacked out every time they want to watch a movie.

I never said I liked it that way. I use three displays so I'am just as stuck with this silly problem as everyone on this thread. I just said that the idea behind a fullscreen and a maximized app isn't the same. At least, there is still applications like VLC that implement the old fullscreen behaviour and you can allway use applications like BetterSnapTools to help get more out of the space on your screens.

I think the issue is that they have a reduced API for fullscreen to speed things up. Not unlike DirectX games which take over your graphics display. This guarantees no overlapping windows etc and allows for different screen resolutions.

So I think they did this for speed. It bypasses the normal windowing API so things happening in a remote window are not serviced. Should be great for games as they won't be running in a window.

Applications can still do a borderless maximize window if the programmer codes it.

I think this will be a passing issue. In the meantime, just don't hit that button if it annoys you

it's my understanding that that's how macs in general work. So if an application fails, it doesn't crash the whole computer, just that app. If anything, fullscreening an app would make things heavier, not liter. and I doubt it'll make your applications run faster.

It will definitely makes things faster (unless written very poorly by Apple).

There is no multi-windowing stuff, so there is no need to buffer and redraw areas of the screen that are fully or partially hidden by another window, popup, mouseover, taskbar / launcher etc. That is huge.

So the extra layer that re-maps window data to screen data doesn't need to exist.

This is the whole reason for Microsoft inventing DirectX in the first place, to allow for hardware acceleration by bypassing as much of Windows as possible, and also why games are run in full screen and not in a window on the desktop (because running in a window on the desktop has so much extra overhead).

I do think though they should make a alt-click do the maximise-window, so people have both options.

No it doesn't change anything, you still need to compose the screen from the multiple controls in one window. BTW, the fullscreen thing for games has nothing to do with it. It's just because since Windows XP lack a desktop windows manager, only one application at a time can use DirectX so there is no way to compose a hardware accelerated window with a non hardware accelerated window because the buffers can't talk to each other. That's why they introduced a DWM in Vista. Now, the window composition step is handled by the hardware and every windows are actually a DirectX surface. You don't have to redraw the partially hidden windows either since each one has its own buffer. You just need to recompose the screen which is really fast and easy to do. That's why you don't see those http://imageshack.us/f/87/22120951.jpg/ in Vista when the Aero interface is enabled and that's also why moving windows around won't use up all your CPU 😉

To summerise, there is no constant redraw in mordern OSes. They only redraw a window when they need to. Each window has it's own buffer and is hardware accelerated. There is no extra overhead to run a DirectX application in a window since the OS will hate to compose the screen anyway in fullscreen. That composition step is handled by a Desktop Window Manager (DWM on Windows, Quark Extreme on OS X, Gnome/KDE on Linux). What makes application take down the whole system is kernel mode vs user mode code execution and not rendering.

Ok, I did some research, and you are correct assuming using modern os and modern graphics cards with loads of memory and opengl optimizations have been setup to mitigate the concerns I had.

I never had such hardware and stopped using Windows after XP.

I think this article explains the concerns also

http://hacksoflife.blogspot.com/2009/12/full-screen-or-windowed-mode.html

It discusses the game x-plane and why they don't use fullscreen mode, but rather full-window mode.

It does say fullscreen is faster though (obvious really as it's doing less) , although not as dramatic as I was thinking.

I have no idea whether fullscreen on a Mac is using the window manager or not. I was guessing as it seems a waste of time to use the window manager when there is only ever 1 window, and it does seem faster to me

Thank you for attempting to totally change the subject about Lions dual monitor fiasco. The fact that you cannot use both screens with two different applications is crazy Greencard please dismiss yourself. This thread is going to talk about one thing and one thing only FIX THE DUAL SCREEN ISSUE.

NiqueXyZ wrote:

That's an awesome solution...I don't think they'll do it but it's still awesome and honestly how I expected Lion to act to begin with.

Why don't you think they would do it? I too thought they would do it like this, almost seems like a no brainer, right?

and about the other thing I think the main complaint is he's spitting off windows stuff and falsities , like "macs should be more like windows" stuff to us like we're on an open forum. this is an apple forum with mac users. Chances are most mac users were once PC users, hence the bitter distrust and hate. No biggy. 😎

MikeMargolis YOU ARE NOT EVEN IN FULL SCREEN MODE?!?!?

You are not even remotely close to what we are talking about

if you dont see this on your second screen you need to stop posting

your issue is that your screens are not orianted correctly thats very clear...

GO here

Well thank you for the very warm welcome, Dear Mr. UnixToy.

I don't know what full screen mode is, all I know is that I could not get Mail on one screen and Excel on the other. Called Support and they were lost. I was told it was not possible in Lion. Really. I figured it out and thought I'd share my answer.

If my answer is not to your problem, why don't you be quiet and move on to the next post? Hopefully I'll help somebody out there.

And actually, my screens are oriented correctly (not "orianted") so you can see my mouse go where it is supposed to from screen to screen.

Have a lovely day.

I can't think of anything that I haven't raised a stink about that apple eventually hasn't put into their os or resolved, current issue excluded of course.

In general, apple is pretty good with answering a demand for something useful and where they fall short usually third part applications usually pick up the slack. And with how many people seem to be on the exact same page as me (and you!) we could figure that at least 100 more people feel that way each (maybe more but I don't want to sound astronomical).

Apple didn't get where it is today by ignoring their users. Just saying, I know this will sound fanboy esque but on the contrary, you have to fight and scape for something to happen, but something happens!

Adding another voice here that 'full screen' means 'full screen' and not "I only want to view one of my monitors right now'

At least make seperate API calls available in the implementation so the application can determine whether to make it more like a 'presentation' (blank the other screens with the texture) or whether the application just goes full screen and still allows the use of alternative displays.

Aside from 'save a version'... 'full screen' is the second worst Lion feature (excluding lion server)

I too am one for the "Unlink spaces when using multiple displays" option. its the way spaces should have allways worked. I like to use my main monitor with one space only, but would love to have several spaces on my secondary display, I was expecting to see it in Snow Leopard, and now Lion seems a step back. Im glad to see someone has brought it up while we were on the subject of multiple displays. It is quite obvious that Lion was designed with notebooks in mind.

As for the original discussion, there should be a seperate option that would not blank-out, or put a pattern on any other displays when running apps in full-screen mode, something like a "Full-screen per display" option.

I did. Thank you for your posts, TheSmokeMonster, let's all keep banging on Apple's door about the lack of a properly working full screen functionality.

Well done, your diagram and your explanation. Sounds very logical to me to first hover with the pointer over the screen that you want to be affected and then choose a Space.

This would definitely work for me. I have 3 preset buttons on my keyboard to switch between 3 different Spaces that I use. It would even work out well with the swipe gesture on a pad.