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

I have no confidence that Apple will be fixing this.  As good mushrooms,  we're not allowed to know what they're doing.

Apple have implemented the new  full-screen model in their rush to "tabletify" the user interface in a vain attempt to merge tablets and mouse-driven devices.  I hope above hope that Apple have learned from this;  Mac users aren't all one-dimensional lightweight users running a couple of applications on a small screen.  Some of us have work to do and need to run dozens of programs on multiple monitors *and* multiple desktops.

It's even broken when you connect a video projector;  open a file in preview,  then show it in full screen and *shazam* the screen's blank as the file's now full-screen on the MacBook whilst your colleagues rib you about running a Mac and not Windows.

Lion also brought us the horrid Misson Control which is vastly inferior to Spaces;  the pointless LaunchPad/wotever which looks just plain stupid on a large screen;  and Lion broke the just about perfect full screen operation of Snow Leopard.  That's no kind of progress;  that's regression.

should there be any hope in this situation?

Will Apple produce computers with an MiniDisplay Port?

Or will the suppose that everybody connects an AppleTV to their projector when they are doing presentatins on the go?

What are they thinking? I'm loosing hope...

I'm sitting here on my wifes MacBookPro 13" and I can see how the full screen works a treat. Clearly this was designed with laptops (small creen real estate) in mind and there was no thought given to multi screens, which lets face it, many laptop and desktop users employ these days.

Having spent much of my career in a software company I can fully understand why apple don't want to let us into exactly what they are thinking, for the most part because if you chage your mind or go in a differenet direction from that which you have already shared with the world you look even more stupid.

I totally agree with you about mission control, what a waste of space, but this does not annoy me anywhere near as much as the fiasco with full screen. What a brilliant idea, badly implented for anything but a single screen. Anyone acceptance testing this on a multi screen system would easily see the problem in seconds. I can just see the memo from the testers now, and the response saying "No we are going with that, we have no time to change it now".

We can only hope that Apple will listen to reason, but most large companies don't. I am personally loosing patients with apple, I used Mobile Me for years (yes I was one of the dumb *** idiots who paid for it) but actually it was great for me to develop simple but good looking websites, have cheap web hosting and a bunch of email addresses for my family and business. iCloud is actually completely different and not a replacement. I now have to find a web hosting service, and the only benefit I get is my iPhone, iPad and MacBook syncronizing a little better than they did using Mobile Me. Add this to the fact that iWeb is basically just being dumped. I aslo feel that the App store is kinda Monopolistic and those of use who love thier iPads, have no real alternatives for software. Apple feels like Microsoft now!

Regards,

Guy

MacWorld Article:

OS X should embrace multiple displays

One can send these links through the Mac OS X feedback forum. I think this should be done by many, to enlight the team about this problem!

http://www.macworld.com.au/blogs/os-x-should-embrace-multiple-displays-45141/

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3196329?tstart=0

Sincerely

Christoffer

<Email Edited by Host>

Done!

Hi I have exactly the same problem.

Here is workaround for QT video:

1. open folder with video clips

2. move opened folder to second monitor

3. select video and press space bar

4. put video to full screen mode or pinch to zoom over the video on your trackpad

finally you can watch your video in QT on second monitor or external HDMI TV in full screen mode

This is only workaround for "native" QT video.

But I would like use my full screen Apps in this way:

first monitor (desktop) with open folders and so...

second monitor (desktop) with Safari in full screen mode (let's say full monitor mode)

third desktop with my emails in full screen mode and forth desktop with my iTunes in full screen mode.

I would like change actual desktop view by swiping my fingers over the trackpad (move full screen apps from one monitor to another - like 1,2,3,4 desktops, on mon1 present desk1 on mon2 present desk 2 afrer swipe from right to left move desk2 to mon1 and present desk3 on mon2 and so on).

After 21 pages of replies, I had hoped to stumble across an "it finally works" announcement, but ... no.

Please forgive me a rant.

I came to the Apple world in 2007 after traversing decades of CP/M, DOS, Windows, OS/2 and Linux. At the time I bought my mid-2007 MacBook, I'd fully embraced having *NIX under the bonnet, but had grown tired of 12 years of upgrading Slackware invariably breaking Japanese input support. A friend showed me that Apple, indeed, understood multilanguage support. I bought the farm.

Tiger was good on the 13" MacBook. Adding an external monitor was absolutely fantastic. My workflows changed over time to accommodate the new space. Possibilities abounded. I skipped Leopard entirely, but upgraded to Snow Leopard when security patches for Tiger stopped coming. Snow Leopard was "different" than Tiger, and it took some getting used to, but overall the changes were okay. Although I remember being moritified at the change in the user experience at the time, I honestly can't remember what the issues were now. Go figure.

Now that Mountain Lion is just around the corner, security releases will soon be cut off for Snow Leopard. Which means that, ultimately, the ol' MacBook should be upgraded. Except that the development and testing I do in Windows XP/7 in Parallels Desktop really requires full-screen on my 23" Acer and e-mail/Finder/whatever on my primary display. *sigh* This thread has me thoroughly depressed.

I guess we should have seen this coming. Front Row on Snow Leopard already does/did the full-screen-on-primary-display-only thing, which was a real point of irritation for me for videos. Front Row, to the best of my knowledge, could not be configured any other way. Sad, really.

Sometimes, I wonder whether the people who design things actually USE them. The people who designed full-screen mode on Lion/Mountain Lion probably have a 6-display setup on Ubuntu at home. They're laughing their butts off right now.

I'm with most of the people on this thread: the Full-Screen implementation in Lion is a flat out stupid. 

BUT

I feel the Lion implementation of Exposé and Spaces is a far bigger problem than the full screen support

Workaround:

Regarding VM software like the last poster mentioned, the VM vendors I believe have already address full-screen support.  Like apps did before Lion, THEY JUST IMPLEMENT THEIR OWN FULL SCREEN CODE.  I don't feel like checking right now, but I believe VMware and Parallels already do their own full screen code, where you can full screen on any monitor, and the other monitors don't go blank.  The app does not get its own page in MC, but since MC is a huge lump of dog waste anyway, who needs that? 

Any respectable developer for Mac knows the Lion & ML full screen support is atrocious.  They all just do their own now.  If they don't, they'll lose out to competitors who do.  VLC is another example… it full screens no problem at this point.

So yes, this "full screen fiasco" really isn't that big of a problem.  There IS a workaround, and good devs already know about it.  THE BIGGER PROBLEM is Expose and Spaces is completely broken, and there's absolutely no APIs to fix it.  MC, and Exposé and Spaces before it, have PRIVILEGED access to the WindowServer, in order to do animations which don't suck (lag). 

Third party software DOES NOT have this level of access, and therefore, no matter how much we want to, we may not be able to duplicate Exposé and Spaces on Lion and ML through the APIs that are available. See the latest posts on the blog that hosts ReSpace for references.  THAT is a huge problem….. this is less as much….

P.S. now that I see you mention Front Row doing the same full screen garbage, I'm reminded that I never used it because of that.  I can't be the only one.  Too bad Apple didn't use their analytics to figure out, they destroyed Front Row with that feature, and it never got any use because of it.  Yeesh…

P.P.S.  Next time you want to know if "it finally works yet", just skip to the last page on a forum thread.   Reading all 21 pages isn't necessary in that case…

lmao @ "The people who designed full-screen mode on Lion/Mountain Lion probably have a 6-display setup on Ubuntu at home. They're laughing their butts off right now."  <---  Couldn't be more true.

Thank you miroam Your quicktime workaround (three posts above) was perfect for me.  As I stated many posts back, I can fullscreen web-browser videos ie: from Youtube, News pages etc on my 2nd monitor (HDTV), but was not able to with videos residing in my Finder that would open in quicktime.  With your simple workaround, that is now solved.

Thanks again!

-Peter

@NorrinRadd:

Thanks for the reply. VMWare definitely does its own full-screen mode, but I wasn't sure about Parallels Desktop 7. I fired up the online help and looked at the issue and, sure enough, there's an option in the full-screen mode settings to enable use of all desktops during full-screen mode. Users of Parallels should note that the Lion-native behaviour is the default setting, so if you want it to behave has PD6 and 7 natively did on Snow Leopard, you'll have to go in and tweak your VM settings.

Probably the best reason I had for reading the whole thread was seeing various attempts at workarounds. For me, the best value was in recognizing that I can set QuickTime 7 Pro as my use-for-everything video viewer and continue enjoying full-screen videos on the big monitor while retaining the menu bar on the primary screen. That right there is a big win.

The question that remains is whether my mid-2007 MacBook's VM video performance in Parallels will go down in Lion compared to Snow Leopard. Windows 7 gives the VM a 2.0 rating for video, which is marginal for the testing I'm doing. If it goes lower, then I'm kinda hosed and upgrading won't be an option anyway. I'll have to ask about that in a different thread. Maybe somebody can shed some light on it.

I'll stick with Snow Leopard, in any case, for as long as I can. Thanks for the insights, folks.

I just upgraded to Lion last night.  And just came accross this issue. 

The one program I have found that doesn't suffer from this is Firefox.  I'm assuming that this is because it doesn't offer the apple full screen fucntion but it's own built in fucntion.  I was able to browse on my external monitor in full screen and keep using the desktop in the other.

Just an FYI

Question for those who rent/buy movies from iTunes: In Snow Leopard, one can move the full-screen view of a movie by changing to windowed mode while viewing, dragging to a new monitor and then switching back to full screen. How does this behave in Lion? Does the full-screen view always move to the primary display no matter what or does it duplicate the SL behaviour of adapting to the monitor from which the full-screen mode was invoked?

Trane Francks wrote:

 

Question for those who rent/buy movies from iTunes: In Snow Leopard, one can move the full-screen view of a movie by changing to windowed mode while viewing, dragging to a new monitor and then switching back to full screen. How does this behave in Lion? Does the full-screen view always move to the primary display no matter what or does it duplicate the SL behaviour of adapting to the monitor from which the full-screen mode was invoked?

You can change which monitor is primary by dragging the menubar to that monitor in Dislpay setup. But thats no biggy cause it always blacks out the other monitor, primary or not. iTunes and QT are useless in multi monitor setup.

I HAVE IT WORKING!!!!

I of course haven't read this whole thread, I want to do my business work and watch my movie.

If you want VLC or any other program on one monitor drag it to that monitor, right click on the icon in the dock -> Options -> Assign to -> All Desktops.

To View it in fullscreen: In VLC go to Preferences -> Video and uncheck 'Blank screens in full screen mode'

Et Voila, it works. The only issue is when you switch spaces (for your non-fullscreen monitor), you see the desktop on the other monitor for a split second before VLC pops up there; so I'd really like a fix for this in Mountain Lion, which FYI, I think will be awesome!!