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

Well, that video indicates that a fullscreened application can address the entire screen area.

So something like VMware or the new Virtualisation in Lion could get you to multiple applications running fullscreen. Seems like a big hassle for a small feature, but it could be done.

Obviously the design direction of the OS is headed towards iOS and a sandbox + database model, so applications becoming more discrete and modal is the chosen design direction, and the fullscreen utility reflects that. I see it as one small statement of a larger design direction.

I'd agree that the Finder files & windows model is getting a bit long in the tooth (new in the 70s) but it shouldn't be replaced with something less powerful / more restrictive.

The question, really, is whether apple will give users a properly engineered and designed computer administration application to replace the finder, which reflects the additional power of UNIX, or whether it'll all be black boxed and you get a glorified dock, like in iOS, which hides away the BSD system underneath. If apple become the systems administrators of the OSX platform, then they can control what software runs and doesn't run. Gatekeeper is that technology for the desktop, and iOS devices have run that business model of central administration since the beginning, and it is very profitable.

Of course, if apple do dumb it down too heavily, there will be the opportunity for somebody from the 3rd party world to come in and build something that suits the power users / sysadmin people, and that's where I'd place my bets.

da bishop wrote:

 

Well, that video indicates that a fullscreened application can address the entire screen area.

 

True, and that aspect has been discussed. Apps, such as Photoshop, that are built to take advantage of multiple screens do so and that isn't a problem. The problem comes for those of us with workflows that require access to multiple applications during full-screen operation.

I agree that virtualization is a huge hassle. Patently, it shouldn't be necessary, either.

I disagree that windowed applications is 1970s. We live in an object world of containers and surfaces; in the 2D universe of the desktop, a tiled/cascaded windows paradigm works extremely well, especially when mated to virtual desktops and multiple displays. That single-app/sandboxed approach that works so well on an iPhone and an iPad causes no end of suffering on a collection of large-format, extended virtual desktops.

The sad thing for me in all of this was that I came to the Mac back in 2007 because I became sufficiently disenchanted with Slackware to make the switch after more than a decade with it as my primary desktop. Now I find myself looking at the logistics of moving back to Linux because of the direction that OS X is taking.

I find that rather ironic.

a tiled/cascaded windows paradigm works extremely well,

I'm only talking about the Finder model as developed for the Macintosh to run C++ on virtually bare metal.

What I imagine as a perfect visual representation of the way that UNIX works, it looks like a flowchart of many panels which can be popped open to reveal their arguments, on one horizontal desk mounted touch screen, and a big GPU output on another vertical full screen.

Any hope for a solution at the WWDC??

Getting tired of this...

https://twitter.com/claymill/statuses/212245215015219201

Although that could mean it'll still blank the other monitor.

Norrin, nice spot -- although in the latest DP it's still the exact same behavior as it is in 10.7

Maybe it's something they will add for the final build?

I really hope it's true...this is without a doubt the biggest problem I've had with OS X lion and if they were to actually fix this and listen to us, that would be so awesome.

OK I didn't see DP4 was out today, I'll have to give it a try (for some reason I can't edit my above post).

I'll try to report back but I bet my posts will be deleted.

So will mountain lion fix all this then? as they claim?

da bishop wrote:

 

Well, that video indicates that a fullscreened application can address the entire screen area.

One thing I just noticed related to this is that if I turn on full-screen in vlc, the other monitors switch to the dreaded canvas pattern - but I can drag the media playback control window to them!  I'm not positive whether vlc is using their own full-screen imlementation or Apples, but it looks like the Apple one.

Also, after a few months, I've come to these conclusions:

1) full-screen (at least in Lion) is only useful with a single screen and mainly useful for my 11" MBA where I need every pixel!

2) multiple screens only works well in Apple's setup (i.e. Mission-Control/Spaces) if your monitors are next to each other and the same size/resolution.  You can't switch spaces independantely for monitors (Apple's decision) and dragging windows between monitors of different resolutions is very strange and not too useful.

So, my MBA pretty much has everything in full-screen - unless I need to see two windows at once.

And my iMac 27" sits next to 2 Dell u2711s (same LCD panel as the Mac) so OS/X can treat it as one giant screen. 

Seems to work great until Apple gets around to "fixing" this some day.  Of course, with the bad joke of labelling the Mac Pro on their website as "New" when all they did was slightly bump the processor speed and RAM, and their subsequent statements about a real Mac Pro update coming sometime in 2013, I wouldn't hold my breath for any hardware or software features that target pro/power users!

VLC has user-definable behaviour. One can use Apple's implementation or its own. The latter preserves use of non-fullscreened displays.

Not to be rude again but can the people who post please actually read the first couple pages of the thread; I know it's an inconvenience and such but really I hate seeing the same posts like "OMG VLC WORKS!" etc. over and over again.  On another note; has anyone tried DP4 yet?  I didn't get a chance to today -- will definitely try it tomorrow and report back.

Multi Screen behavior in ML DP4 is unchanged from DP3 and from Lion...

It's the same -- installed and confirmed just now.

So one of two possibilities:

1.) The functionality will be implemented in the gold master

2.) I'm (we're?) mis-interpreting what "run full screen apps on any monitor" means (taken from the apple WWDC presentation regarding ML features)

From a usability perspective, fullscreen mode should really be called "single application mode".

I'm having same issue, I've been holding out with just making the program screen as big as possible on the monitor or "turning on mirroring" and turning away my monitor when I want to simply watch a film with quicktime. It's very tedious though.