Detect Display button gone!

Question

Level 1

4 points

Detect Display button gone!

This is a rather infuriating mess-up in Mountain Lion. My wife is an educator and has a class room projector she has to connect and disconnect to on a daily basis with her brand new Macbook Air.

The problem is that her Macbook Air will not detect the projector when she connects it.

The only way it will detect is if she either restarts the computer with the projector already connected or puts her computer to sleep and waits for to wake up and that sometimes works.

Where as in Lion or any other previous version of OSX in the past five years you had the option of a Display Menu button (also gone) up at the top of your screen that showed connected displays as well as a Detect Diplays option that would do the trick. To make things worse even if you go digging to the System preferences under Displays Preferences they completely removed the Detect Displays button!

The funny part is the Apple help menu still tells you click the Detect Displays button that doesn't exist.

How on earth do you take such a monumental step backwards with an OS upgrade by making settings more difficult than easier? Having to restart a computer to detect a display? As a Mac user I haven't had to do that in the past 10 years! Please return us all the display options that should be available under any circumstance period.

MacBook Air, OS X Mountain Lion

Posted on Aug 21, 2012 7:39 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

Eric.

Level 6

12,260 points

Aug 21, 2012 8:11 AM in response to Andrew Fite

1. First see: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5369

How can I detect displays?

If the detect displays option is not available, hold down the Option key while you are in the Display pane.

Like magic it appears and disappears for me by pressing "option" in the Displays System Preference.

2. As far as the menubar icon, I know how to get it back, but I'm not sure how much good it will do. I only have Mt. Lion on a virtual machine at the moment. So you'll need to activate it to see whether it works like the old versions.

Navigate to:

/System/Library/CoreServices/MenuExtras

Double-click "Displays.menu" which will activate the Displays menubar icon.

Reply

Answer 2

Andrew Fite Author

Level 1

4 points

Aug 21, 2012 8:55 AM in response to Eric.

Thanks Eric for the reply.

Unfortunately, that doesn't solve my problem. It places a pretty icon up at the top of my screen, but nothing useful below it. They have in all practical senses removed all usefulness from the menu icon which makes sense why they don't allow you to enable it. Even though I have two displays connected it shows nothing in terms of Display resolutions or the Detect Displays function that I need. I think the real problem is that they need two separate menus (1 for the Airplay features which is what the current menu icon is for) (2 for hardware connected displays) I don't know what they were thinking when completely ditching the hardware connected monitor options?

Thanks for the tip though. I didn't know how to do that

Reply

Answer 3

Andrew Fite Author

Level 1

4 points

Aug 21, 2012 10:16 AM in response to Andrew Fite

Well folks I did find a work around for the time being. Though it doesn't restore my options in the menu button I did uncover the Detect Displays button. I was looking at my post request and behold I saw a related article next to this thread that says OS X Mountain Lion: About the Display pane of System Preferences ( http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5369?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US ) in the article it shows that they did indeed hide the option but it can be uncovered. The funny thing is this article does not show up when I search for my problem.

Hold the OPTION key in the Display Preference pane and the Gather Windows button will transform into the Detect Displays button.

Here are screenshots to demonstrate what happens when you toggle the OPTION key off and on.

Again why on earth did they hide this to begin with or not include it in the Display Menu option at the top of the screen? I don't know and I hope they fix it. This is WAY TOO complicated of a solution for a simple function. Nobody is going to intuitively find the Detect Displays option.

Reply

Answer 4

Eric.

Level 6

12,260 points

Aug 21, 2012 3:04 PM in response to Andrew Fite

Andrew Fite wrote:

Well folks I did find a work around for the time being. Though it doesn't restore my options in the menu button I did uncover the Detect Displays button. I was looking at my post request and behold I saw a related article next to this thread that says OS X Mountain Lion: About the Display pane of System Preferences ( http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5369?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US ) in the article it shows that they did indeed hide the option but it can be uncovered. The funny thing is this article does not show up when I search for my problem.

Umm...that was the first thing I said to try, including a link to that article.

The second was to add the menubar icon.

Oh well, glad you got it worked out.

Reply

Answer 5

Andrew Fite Author

Level 1

4 points

Aug 21, 2012 3:50 PM in response to Eric.

Hi Eric,

You're absolutely right that your post shows that right now. I apologize for the confusion. I don't know what happened but your post originally only showed the following:

" I know how to get the menubar icon back, but I'm not sure how much good it will do. I only have Mt. Lion on a virtual machine at the moment. So you'll need to activate it to see whether it works like the old versions.

Navigate to:

/System/Library/CoreServices/MenuExtras "

I still have the email copy that was sent to me that still only shows this section of your post. Maybe you updated it with all that info later after originally posting. Either way I appreciate your help and thank you for the follow up.

Reply

Answer 6

tjwolf

Level 1

69 points

Sep 14, 2012 7:02 AM in response to Eric.

Thanks a bunch Eric!

But what kind of stupid UI change is that?? Andrew is right - nobody's going to find that on their own! The "?" Help doesn't talk about it at all either. When I first tried it, I had to look twice to notice it - because it doesn't even bring up another button but simply replaces the text in the "Gather Windows" button with "Detect Displays".

I'm a GUI developer and one of most basic principles is to not hide functionality from the user! Apple screwed up big time in this area, IMHO.

Reply

Answer 7

ethel

Level 1

60 points

Dec 5, 2012 6:23 AM in response to Eric.

thanks for this....totally stumped me until read about using the Option option ....weird they hide!

Reply

Answer 8

Sep 4, 2013 6:45 AM in response to Andrew Fite

Hi All,

I had this same challenge and found someone has written an app to create the functionality of the old Display Menu fromt he task bar. This is the article mentioning it:

http://www.macworld.com/article/2013295/display-menu-brings-back-os-xs-displays- menu.html

From the article....

But a more convenient approach can be found in Milch im Gemüsefach's free Display Menu (Mac App Store link).

Like the old Displays menu extra, clicking Display Menu shows you a list of all possible screen resolutions, including HiDPI modes (and, for some displays, refresh rates); choose one to switch to it. If you've got multiple displays, you can also toggle mirroring, which means you can disable Mountain Lion's own Mirroring menu-bar option.

Reply

Answer 9

niamatu

Level 1

0 points

May 6, 2015 6:24 AM in response to Eric.

this really helped, thanks!!!

Reply