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

Again, this is somewhat off topic, but you should all be aware of it. Sign of the times, to go alongside portable computers jailed as phones, soldered in RAM and glued in batteries. The guy who was the chief architect of OSX... he left just before Lion, saying "I do computer science, not products".

http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/23/apple-loses-mac-software-engineering-svp-bertra nd-serlet-after-22-years/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/mar/24/bertrand-serlet-leaving-ap ple-video

guy was a Xerox PARC alumnus. Proper scientist.

NorrinRadd wrote:

 

Maybe you shouldn't have to use different apps.  BUT YOU DO HAVE TO, regardless to whether you *should* or not -- If you insist of getting full-screen.  Because, as you know, Apple doesnt' work the way you want it to anymore.  FACT.

And in that statement you've managed to sum up the entire issue. Apple was once the master of writing intuitive software that people enjoyed using. All of the Mac fanboys came about because Macs were genuinely nice to use. If they want to retain their easy to use "it just works" reputation they should start listening to this discussion, because the current behaviour is not how people expect it to work. The facts are that Apple claim to have the most intuitive OS, and the best bundled software, yet if I buy a new PC with 2 displays I can watch a video on one screen and work on the other, straight out of the box. With a Mac, I can't! This is the kind of simple, obvioius functionality that a major OS jsut shouldn't get wrong.

"BUT YOU DO HAVE TO" - Yes, I do. And that is precisely the problem.

The fact that you have to resort to personal attack shows entirely the strength of your argument. Switching apps is a working solution. I haven't disputed that, nor have I said I refuse to do that. I have said that I shouldn't have to do that, and that I would like Apple to fix it along with many other people. I would like to continue using Apple software because other than the fullscreen issue I very much like it. However it is just unusable in many situations.

I certainly will not blame myself for functionality that Apple has broken, that is ridiculous to suggest!

 

Lastly, regarding iPhoto, you can see I recommend firefox also.  It does as suggested...

Firefox is also not an image viewer, its a bloated webbrowser. Opening Firefox to view a jpg is, IMHO, massive overkill.

Da Bishop: agreed Preview is primarily a PDF viewer. I nearly called it such, but since it also handles images pretty well I meant "image" as a general term emcompassing postscript files too. Perhaps not very precise, but not really relevant to the point!

Glennny2Lappies wrote:

 

Or that UTTERLY STUPID decision to allow preview to go full screen only on the  "primary" monitor.  So I attach a projector to show a screenshot and blam the projector is blank and I then have to fend off the "well Windows doesn't work like that".

 

I cannot stress how much this angers me.

Alas, I can't think of anything you can do other than try to remember to go into the displays settings in system preferences and drag your menu bar into the projector. Yes, I know. It makes me grind my teeth, too.

NorrinRadd wrote:

 

A Mac user uses full-screen the way it has always worked. You drop the edges bigger! THAT'S the way Sbow Leopard worked!

Dude, I'm using Snow Leopard, and I can assure you that I do not drag the edges of a window, making it bigger to go full-screen in an app. Putting an application in full-screen mode <> making the window bigger. Good grief, man. And even on Snow Leopard, various apps have already broken intelligent use of their full-screen mode by blanking out the secondary display, e.g., Preview, iTunes, Front Row.

It's all well and good to tell people to hunt down other applications that do the job right. The beef here is that they shouldn't need to do that in a properly designed/functioning operating system.

Just read this article -- it made my stomach churn:

http://www.cultofmac.com/174902/the-retina-macbook-pro-can-push-15-million-pixel s-across-four-displays/

What's the point of creating a notebook that can run FOUR displays if the OS it runs blanks out 3 of them when running ONE application in "full screen mode" (or more correctly called "single application mode")

And also as Trane points out, in snow leopard, most of the native apps had "full screen" mode -- it was either via a control+click and context menu or it was in the top finder bar under "view" -- and it would then NOT put the app across the entire display like it had been dragged by a mouse, it would use the entire display and cover up even the top finder bar because thats how full screen apps should work; with one key point -- it DOESN'T interrupt whatever apps are running on your other displays

da bishop wrote:

 

I am a user interface designer, and if Apple want to hire me, I'm willing.

 

When you take on that lucrative position, make Apple follow its own developer guidelines and, for goodness sakes, bring back colour in various application icons. If I wanted grayscale, I'd still be be using DOS with a CGA screen!

I'm still hoping for a fix in the mountain lion GM -- if it's not there, then I'm done with OS X.

Trying to get snow leopard to run on the newer macsis a pain in the you know what, and a lot of times it doesn't work correctly -- if it works at all.

Weeell... Here's what I do.

I run Quicktime in the second monitor and select Fit To Screen from the View menu. If you do that you can run apps on the primary monitor and still watch videos, only then you can't run any apps in full-screen mode on the primary monitor without auto-hiding the video window - so I maximize them instead.

Unfortunately, this will leave you with less screen real-estate because of the system menu and dock. This is easily fixed however. I got Docker from here: http://www.blocksoft.net/docker.html which allows you to auto-hide the dock and system menu. (It also has the added bonus of allowing you to change the look of the dock from the dog-ugly default setting to something less offensive. Man, whatever happened to the beauty and simplicity of the original Mac?).

Also, I set the desktop background of the second monitor to black so as not to overwhelm the video window.

Another thing you can do is get the VCL media player from here: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html, which has it's own full-screen mode which doesn't default to the primary monitor. It does black out the unused monitor by default but you can turn that off. I've found it's a bit of a hog to run, however, unlike the Windows version. Also, it has a media library "feature" which I don't like. (iTunes has a lot to answer for IMO). I don't want umpteen programs keeping catalogs of my files, thanks, because I know how to use Finder and it's more than adequate!

None of this is ideal I guess, and this issue with full-screen and dual monitors is something that deffo needs to be fixed in a future update IMO. Hey, if Apple wan't to "keep it simple" then that's fine (sounds like a shady excuse to me) so long as you can go into System Preferences and tweak the config for those of us who like to have a bit more control.

look what i've found:

That's good news for ML. I wonder if there's even a shred of hope for a 10.7.5 release to bring that functionality to Lion. If it doesn't, Lion could very well end up being the very first OS I purchased but didn't actually install.

Well that *****.  I have a feeling it's still going to canvas \ blank out all the other monitors when running an app in full screen mode.  Terrible

Anyway, now that I know what to look for, I can try it on ML DP4 and see if that exact functionality exists.

Will post back in a few.

On my Mackbook Pro 13" I am using Parallels 7 Desktop for Mac on Lion 10.7.4 to run Windows 7 Pro in the virtual machine.  Parallels has an opton to "Use Mac OS X Full Screen" (see image below).

When working without an external monitor I find this very handy.  You make the app window "full-screen" with the double-headed arrow and the app goes full screen in its own desktop.  One can simply do the 4-finger swipe to move to one desktop to another.

BUT, try this with an external monitor attached an we're back to the same problem - make Parallels full-screen and the other screen(s) become unusable.

I have tried de-selecting the option to "Use Mac OS X Full Screen" and, with some fooling around depending upon the order in which I start applications, I can get Parallels full-screen in one monitor and use various apps in the other - I can even drag a Mac app over the full-screen Parallels app.  Clearly Parallels has figured that users want to have their app full-screen on one monitor while leaving other monitors available. To do this they cannot use "Mac OS X Full Screen" but have to use some other mechniasm. 

However, and I admit not fully exploring all the options, Parallels implementation of full-screen has other issues.  This just speaks to the need for Apple to implement Full-Screen in a manner that works as we want (leaving other monitors usable) without forcing developers to implement their own unique full-screen mechanisms that, predictably, will not all work the same of may introduce other application-specific quirks.

In looking at Parallels to the limited extent I have, I noticed a disturbing behaviour.  Regardless of whether an app is in the (non-Apple) full-screen mod or not, with an external monitor attached if I do the 4-finger swipe across the track pad BOTH monitors move simultaniously through their desktops rather than the swipe effecting only the monitor where the cursor happens to be.

This is problematic for me.  For example, if I have Parallels full-screen on the external monitor on the left and say Safari on the Macbook Pro and with the cursor on the Mackbook screen 4-finger swipe in either direction, both monitors move to their own next desktop and Parallels dissappears from my left monitor as does Safari from the Macbook Pro.

I may not have described this well or extensively and the discussion of this "desktop" behaviour is probably a diversion from this group (although related).  Can anyone advise where I might best discuss this particular topic?

Thanks folks.

I can't speak for others, but I certainly don't find any issue with how Parallels Desktop works in full screen. For me, it's pretty much perfect. I love, for example, being able to copy files onto my Windows desktop simply by dragging and dropping from Finder onto my VM. It's as seamless as I could ever want.

If you're concerned about swiping over to another desktop and losing your VM in the process, Mission Control lets you define to display the application on all desktops. Drag Parallels into a spot on the Dock. With multiple desktops running already, right-click (control-click, two-finger-click) on Parallels in the Dock. In the Options menu, you'll see three choices related to Spaces:

- Assign To All Desktops

- This Desktop

- None

Assign to all desktops and your VMs will follow you wherever you swipe.

You cite an interesting feature with "Assign To All Desktops".  It seems the behaviour differs depending upon how you set Parallel's "Full Screen" configuration and "Use Mac OS X Full Screen".  In other words whether or not OS X Lion or the application is handling the full-screen mode.

WIth this option UNSELECTED, in other words letting the non-Apple application take care of full-screen behaviour:

- put the VM on the external monitor, "Assign To All Desktops" as you suggest, then make the VM full screen

- swipe to next desktop (left or right) both monitors go to next desktop but after a very short delay the full screen VM window re-appears in the external monitor.

With this option SELCTED, in other words letting Lion take care of full-screen behaviour:

- put the VM on the external monitor, "Assign To All Desktops" as you suggest, then make the VM full screen

- VM window goes full screen but immediately shifts to the primary monitor (the Macbook), the external monitor becomes useless as described ad nauseum in this discussion.

- swipe to next desktop (left or right) both monitors go to next desktop and with that so also goes the VM window - out of sight and unavailable.

Based on my (very brief) experience above I assume you have UNSELECTED "Use Mac OS X Full Screen".

Assuming I did everything correctly this gets back to the point of this discussion - that Apple's implementation of full-screen is problematic  in terms of how it functions, and also in terms of leaving it up to the third party application coders to figure their own unique (and thus not universal) way of handling full-screen. Thus we also lose one of the great things about the Mac - the consistency between applications - by forcing app developers to implement full-screen in their own way.

Hi, KB.

The issue is complex and annoyingly worthy of the 31 pages of replies in the thread.

For your example of using Lion's native fullscreen mode, the issue of losing the VM while swiping is that Lion treats a fullscreen application as its own virtual desktop. And as pointed out in the thread, it makes more sense to view Lion's fullscreen mode as actually being "single application mode". So, yeah, swiping away from your fullscreen VM will have it go bye-bye in Apple's API implementation.

As you've discovered, the only way to get it to work as you want is to use Parallel's own implementation. It's frustrating that Apple hobbled their implementation to the point that it took away functionality instead of adding to it. I've played with Lion just enough to discover that I'm really not a fan. Not only do I think the dual-monitor support with fullscreen apps is a failure of epic proportion, the iOSification of OS X leaves a bad taste in my mouth. UI design optimized for small, single-display, touchscreen interaction simply cannot scale to a multiple-screen, extended-display virtual desktop environment that utilizes pointing devices. As such, I'm sticking with Snow Leopard until such time as support for security patches reach end-of-life. After that, I'll reassess my options.

Cheers.