16 ms·

Fullscreen in Mountain Lion still renders second display useless

234 points by wesbos 14y ago

CubicleNinjas 14y ago
Fullscreen is meant to focus you on one app. Spaces, aka. Mission Control, aka. "whateverthehellthey'recallingitthisweek", is meant to multimonitor set-ups with a bunch of apps in preset places. Use spaces/missioncontrol. Personally, I don't get full-screen apps at all and wish this feature would die a painful and horrible death. I'd love to see stats on its use, as I've never seen anyone who actually knows what its cryptic icon represents.
- mdonahoe 14y ago
  I use it almost exclusively on my 11" air. With limited screen space it is very helpful. And swiping directionally between fullscreen apps is more intuitive than cmd-tab. But it is total garbage on a large screen, so I don't use it when docked.
  - CubicleNinjas 14y ago
    This is very helpful. I guess it is for smaller screen sizes. It makes sense now. Thank you!
- mikerastiello 14y ago
  I agree, I don't get the appeal either. I never use it on my 13" MBP, whether it's just the laptop or if I have it set up with an external 24" as a second monitor. On my 27" iMac the only time I have a window maximized is when I have iPhoto open. However, the window is maximized, I'm not in fullscreen mode.
- pooriaazimi 14y ago
  I use it on my 15" MacBook pro all the time, and really enjoy it. I don't have external displays, so it's a great thing for me. But as others have said, with an external display attached to yor Mac, it's absolute garbage.
- xentronium 14y ago
  > Fullscreen is meant to focus you on one app. My common use case is opening text editor in fullscreen on main display and terminal with tests and tail -f log on the secondary one. Using Lion's fullscreen mode could help me get some extra screen estate for the editor, were it done right. Also, why force turning off the displays? After all, one can press the power button or dim it using brightness settings, if the need arises.
dguaraglia 14y ago
Wow, apparently some people are so blinded by fanboyism (I know one such person myself) that they can't accept something created by Apple might have an issue. Some of the answers can be summed up as "hey, before you couldn't do X before, so stop moaning and keep doing what you did before if you don't like how X works!". Even in the bad old days of Microsoft MVPs you didn't get answers as hostile as that. This is almost religious fervor. WTF?
- JacksonGariety 14y ago
  At WWDC, they showed that Mountain Lion would enable multi-monitor fullscreen support. But yes, they shouldn't expect Apple to be their friend and hold true to their word.
  - delinka 14y ago
    "Friend"? No. Stand by their word? I expect that form everyone but am often disappointed. Don't say things you don't intend to follow through on. It makes you untrustworthy. This is probably why Apple stays mum on everydamnthing - the individual employees might mean well, might think something is fully plausible, but then business agendas change, contracts get in the way, and ultimately the corporation doesn't deliver. Easier to just keep your mouth shut and deliver what you deliver. Do I trust people to keep their words? Not immediately - first we try, then we trust.
    - dguaraglia 14y ago
      I think you are missing the point. I think Jackson actually meant the last bit as sarcasm.
  - masklinn 14y ago
    > At WWDC, they showed that Mountain Lion would enable multi-monitor fullscreen support But that support is still garbage. Slightly less than Lion's, but still: "multi-monitor fullscreen support" only means that applications will go fullscreen on the (physical) screen they are currently on rather than move to the primary screen (which for a laptop is the "internal" one, making your 27" Cinema Display a very nice mirror and not much else) as is the behavior in Lion. Fullscreen Mode will still only allow you to use a single physical screen.
nestlequ1k 14y ago
I can confirm it's still busted. After a year of Lion I've learned never to bother with the full screen button (that's a feature for noobs anyways right?) Though what really pisses me off about Mountain Lion multiple monitor is they removed the "Detect Displays" menubar option. Just gone. So now I'm reduced to unplugging and replugging my thunderbolt 27inch display when I connect it to my laptop. F'ing asinine
- thehigherlife 14y ago
  This may fix your problem: http://code.google.com/p/detectdisplays/ http://code.google.com/p/detectdisplays/
  - nestlequ1k 14y ago
    Awesome, just what I needed. Thanks!
- jjcm 14y ago
  I personally use cinch to do window management (or at least arrangement) on osx. Mimics Windows' Aero Snap functionality, and does it pretty well. Never had a need for the zoom button.
zheng 14y ago
I have no reason to upgrade to ML. I don't really use my Air all that much, but if they fixed this I would upgrade in a second. Too bad.
- vertr 14y ago
  ML is noticeably faster and smoother across the board. That's a great reason.
  - crag 14y ago
    Then ML should be free; "faster and smoother" sounds like bug fixes to me.
    - danbee 14y ago
      I'm pretty sure that "faster and smoother" isn't all you get.
podperson 14y ago
The other annoying aspect of this is that there are (hidden?) APIs for making apps functional in fullscreen mode across multiple monitors. Aperture (for sure) and Final Cut Pro X (I believe) both make use of multiple displays.
- X-Istence 14y ago
  I've noticed that in Mail.app for example, if you show the connection doctor, or status or even the address list (Window -> Address panel) while in full screen you can happily drag those across to the secondary/empty screen and they will stay there for the duration of the app being full screened. I don't think a special API is required, just knowledge of the second screen and then placing windows on that second or third screen.
- gunnarsteinn 14y ago
  Parallels also works on multiple monitors in fullscreen mode so it can't be a hidden API. But still, you can't have one app fullscreen on one monitor and another app in the other.
xentronium 14y ago
I solved this problem very easily, by downgrading to Snow Leopard. Also that got rid of kernel panics caused by a bug in Darwin virtual ttys. The worst part of Lion's featured 'fullscreen mode' is that software, that worked fine in fullscreen before, now uses Lion's fullscreen. This doesn't happen on Snow Leopard.
- dguaraglia 14y ago
  The problem with this approach is that a bunch of apps in the App Store, unaccountably, ask for Lion+. I can't see what particular API feature they are using that requires a full OS upgrade, but the last 5 applications I was ready to pay for weren't compatible with Snow Leopard.
  - gurkendoktor 14y ago
    Lion uses versions instead of files (which is its own can of worms). Maintaining support for both sounds like a pain, actually.
- zyb09 14y ago
  Don't you need Lion for the latest Xcode these days? If you're not doing anything in Xcode you might as well boot Linux (or Windows :).
  - xentronium 14y ago
    Unfortunately for iOS developers, yes, you need Lion for latest XCode. Compiler toolchain and other stuff is available via older xcode or gcc-osx-installer project, though.
wdewind 14y ago
Honestly, I think the suggestion of hitting the green button to maximize is completely fine. Except that the green button DOES NOT MAXIMIZE. And never really has. Window management in OSX has always been a complete joke, and it continues to be so. Now pressing the green button in chrome resizes to small and "current" sizes, not "full screen."
- masklinn 14y ago
  > Honestly, I think the suggestion of hitting the green button to maximize is completely fine. It definitely isn't fine when your goal is to maximize content visibility and remove as much chrome as possible, which is the reason you'd put a video player, image reader or web browser in full-screen. > Except that the green button DOES NOT MAXIMIZE. The purported role of the zoom button is to fit the window to the content, but shift-clicking it should maximize. It does so in all the applications I use except (strangely enough) Cocoa Emacs. But that is not fine because it leaves all the chrome around, where the point of full-screen modes is to remove that and potentially re-layout the display to make better use of the now chrome-less canvas.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  I love angry rants from people that think every window manager has to act like Windows. It's a zoom button, not maximize. If you simply Shift-Click you will get the expected effect. There are half a dozen tools that will change the default behavior if you require it.
  - Timothee 14y ago
    But I don't know what "zoom" means in the context of a window. And the inconsistencies of my experiences with various apps didn't make it clear either. (e.g. the infamous mini-player for iTunes) As for Shift-Click I tried it with Chrome and I thought you had made my day. However it didn't do anything different on Messages, nor Safari: it just stretched the window vertically. In my short survey of currently open apps, half were stretching vertically while the other was doing fullscreen. (be it Shift-click or plain click) Only Chrome acts differently.
spenvo 14y ago
I could care less about Apple's Fullscreen API -- what I hate is that apps are replacing their old Fullscreen behavior (like Chrome has) in favor of the Apple standard. Which led me to make this comment on a Firefox 12 HN post a few months ago: "... it will be a shame when they implement full screen if it takes away the current layered option. Firefox is the last major OSX browser to work in fullscreen while still allowing apps to be above or below it. With Moom's hotkeyed window positions--it's extremely convenient to bring a text editor to focus and still be able to scroll the web in the background. Mozilla, please don't let this happen!" Apple's Fullscreen API just seems like a lazy approach to delegating UI real-estate and the last thing power-users would want.
runjake 14y ago
I (mostly [1]) get around this by using SizeUp and its "full screen" keyboard shortcut to maximize my windows. I'm sure Divvy and other tiling window manager software have an equivalent. http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/ http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/ [1] I say "mostly" because it just maximizes the window and doesn't put the app into Apple's Fullscreen API mode.
nchlswu 14y ago
I've never found built in apple features to typically handle dual monitors too great. Sure, multi monitors is fine, but the Spaces and Mission Control UX never scaled well when you added another monitor (IMO). Full screen behaviour just adds to it. It seems to me that >1 monitors are not how Apple envisions their computer configs.
Synaesthesia 14y ago
The way I think they justify this (and I do), is that if you have multiple monitors, then you generally have lots of screen real-estate, and thus won't be using fullscreen mode anyway. I don't, because apps are too big on 24" - fullscreen is best on a small notebook display. I still think Apple should change it though.
- jonhendry 14y ago
  There are some apps it makes sense with, like video, or music, or drawing/painting, or 3D modeling. Or even two-page spreads in Preview.
  - tikhonj 14y ago
    Or, most importantly, Emacs! I don't know where I'd be without a full-screen Emacs.
srik 14y ago
This is not a bug. It is a very intentional feature, like the scroll bars, they decide they had to go against the norm to implement it and they went aead with it. The intended use case is to allow the app access to both the screens. Imagine this in say a video editing environment where you could have the video playing on the left and all the myriad number of controls on the right. The problem is, to my knowledge, almost no app has taken to it yet, no one wants to be the first, heck not even apples own apps feel the need to do it. Conjecture-> The problem is unlike scroll bars you can't have a setting to disable it, because that would mean the app had to retroactively allow itself to run in a single window full screen mode which might be considered unpredictable behavior, something they don't like. So to give them some benefit of doubt I see where they're coming from.
dansanderson 14y ago
I agree this behavior of full-screen mode is counterproductive on multi-monitor set-ups, and it's a serious issue if Apple is encouraging app developers to rely on this behavior instead of providing more useful window layouts. It's a violation of metaphor: "full screen mode" is actually "dedicated space mode," which isn't what multi-monitor users expect or want. From personal experience, I suspect this feature is intended to make Spaces more accessible to novice users on laptops without external monitors, a common case. I never got the hang of Spaces originally, but once I started using full-screen mode while portable, my laptop got immensely more useful. For me, this was a gateway into the rest of Spaces, and now I maintain 3 desktop spaces and 1 full-screen app, and switch between them and Mission Control with trackpad gestures. Heck, I might even start using Dashboard, since it's sitting right there. (Ok, probably not.) It's a gradual introduction to an advanced feature. Apple routinely cuts off its long tail as a streamlining measure, sometimes for UX reasons, sometimes for engineering reasons. They shouldn't always get away with it. At least in this case the intent seems reasonable, even if the side effect isn't.
da_n 14y ago
I think this is all related to the iOS X direction Apple is going with their desktops. they would rather force a broken implementation of full-screen which mimics iOS than rethink it for a desktop. And you know, I hate to say it (as a long time user of Apple computers) but in general they really need to pull their heads out of their arses when it comes to the bizarre direction they're going with the OS X user experience. Imaginary linen canvas everywhere? Horrible slow transitions everywhere, all the time? Or maybe I just want to get some god damn work done here. Apple, we know you can do this stuff ever since the days the genie minimize effect was introduced (or shift-minimize for ultra slow!). Please, get some sanity and just put an advanced panel somewhere in the system preferences with, among other things (tabs in Finder?) an animation = slow/normal/fast/disabled option. We should not need to resort to plist hacks.
- k-mcgrady 14y ago
  I hope that they make OS 11 (or whatever the next major major version of the OS will be) more power user focussed. With the iPad becoming more of a replacement PC for normal users it makes sense they could focus the desktop OS on pro/power users in a couple of years time.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - da_n 14y ago
    I can see such a scenario playing out, I think iOS is by a gaping chasm the proven consumer OS for Apple. I just hope during iOS's continued penetration into the consumer space that they don't mess-up OS X for the actual pro people who want to have nice UNIX based OS with an accessible filesystem etc. Hopefully they will at least give the user more control and options so they can tweak it to their needs/tastes. I am sceptical though. My favourite release of OS X for performance was Tiger, it was rock-solid in my experience and felt lightweight.
    - pyre 14y ago
      > UNIX based OS with an accessible filesystem That's the first time that I've heard of someone praising OS X for its 'accessible filesystem.' Care to expand?
IanDrake 14y ago
I'll probably get slaughtered for saying this, but the more I use OSX and see the really simple stuff that either doesn't exist, doesn't work, or doesn't work well, I end up really confused where most Mac users' complaints of Windows comes from (especially compared to Win7). This comes from working on a '10 MBP with Lion. Full screen is basically like "Maximize" in Windows. To me it was shocking that in 2011 that was touted as a new feature. Other things bother me too, like constantly getting the "beachball" for seemingly simple actions and xcode crashing if I breath too hard. I just assume most people aren't having a similar experience.
- dmishe 14y ago
  If you work with mac for a while you will 1. get used to it 2. learn the difference in thinking 3. burn the damn machine In the first few monthds i almost did 3, but then 1+2 and i love it since And i'm not saying that fullscreen is broken by design here, it is.
- mlwarren 14y ago
  I've had similar experiences. A lot of simple things in OSX just don't feel natural or when done give me a result that I didn't expect. I've been using the OS for almost a year now and still feel that way.
- majormajor 14y ago
  Ever since 10.3, Expose was a fantastic way to manage lots of windows on a small screen (in my case at the time, a 12" Powerbook). Windows never offered anything similarly useful for me until Windows 7's "hover over the taskbar icon to see previews" feature. Then when Apple added Spaces on top of that, the Spaces+Expose combo was even better. I don't understand the desired behavior in Lion at all, though. They took away all-windows Expose (I used to have one corner dedicated to all-windows and another to application-windows) and turned Spaces into this weird hybrid thing with a useless-to-me Full Screen mode... Fortunately, my personal laptop is still on Snow Leopard, and my work machine is used with a couple 24" monitors hanging off of it, so I haven't yet had to use the new way of doing things... But with the recent OS X trends I'm not sure my next laptop will be another Mac.
te_chris 14y ago
I finally upgraded to Lion a few weeks ago because a client I have (I'm a web dev, mostly rails) had an app that was built on Xcode 4.3 that I needed to be able to compile and test. I really miss snow leopard. my computer runs slower now under lion and I'm dubious as to whether the UI improvements improved anything.
teilo 14y ago
Frankly, I don't find the full-screen issue that much of a problem. I use BetterSnapTool to emulate the Windows 7 style drag window to edge functionality. So going full-screen on a window now works exactly like Windows 7. The bigger problem is how it is not possible to drag a window from a "space" on one display, to a "space" in another display when viewing Mission Control. There is no conceivable reason they don't allow this. It worked just fine in Spaces. It has nothing to do with full screen mode. I just don't get it.
- wesbos 14y ago
  I dont think you are understanding the problem here. Its not with maximizing windows on your monitor, its with having apps go fullscreen while still having access to your second monitor. Currently OSX makes the 2nd monitor linnen.
  - teilo 14y ago
    I understand the problem perfectly well. I've used Lion for a long while now. Prior to 10.7 there WAS no fullscreen feature (no universal feature, that is. Individual apps had their own implementations), and I hate how Apple implemented it. Regardless, my point is that a lot of people have been using the full-screen feature as a substitute for full-maximize. I'll gladly sacrifice a quarter inch of screen real-estate to be able to use my external display simultaneously. I actually NEED that menu bar most of the time, anyway.
gavanwoolery 14y ago
You know how I know every operating system is turning into sh_t? The install sizes keep increasing...I could write an operating system with much of today's functionality in probably under 100 mb. With the right system architecture/standardization, I could probably write an operating system under 10 mb. Time for a new operating system. WHO IS WITH ME!? ;)
RivieraKid 14y ago
OS X is the least usable of the desktops I worked on for a longer period of time (Gnome 2 and Windows XP). Mostly because of clunky and slow way of app switching and poor window managment. Unfortunately, "modern" desktops like Gnome 3, Unity or Metro are even worse.
stcredzero 14y ago
I don't use Fullscreen. I have 2 27" monitors hooked up through a Dual Head 2 Go. I use Divvy, which is set up so I can put an app on either 27" screen, or on the left of right of either 27" screen. I find Mission Control to be an adequate Exposé substitute. I don't use spaces.
maerek 14y ago
Holy shit, Apple. It is 2012. Figure out how to do a decent window manager that lets you maximize a window properly.
beedogs 14y ago
Tim Cook is the Steve Ballmer of Apple. And I mean that in every negative way possible. This kind of shit is a great example, but everything he's done since he took over has been a tremendous disappointment. Nobody was clamoring for the iOS experience on the desktop. It's horrible. Get rid of it.
- batista 14y ago
  Well, I for one, like it. And I have been using OS X since 10.2
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  You do understand that the decisions made in Lion probably weren't made by Tim Cook? I'm frankly tired of hearing "OH APPLE IS BURNING, IT'S COOK'S FAULT". If everything he's done has been a disappointment why are Apple making more money than ever? And apparently people were clamouring for it, just you weren't.
n-gauge 14y ago
Disclaimer:I have 0 Apple products, Does using a usb powered/driven screen have the same problem? (as they tend to use their own driver IME). I know they are slower to update, but for monitoring use should be fine.
chj 14y ago
that is why i don't use fullscreen

234 points by wesbos 14y ago

Fullscreen is meant to focus you on one app. Spaces, aka. Mission Control, aka. "whateverthehellthey'recallingitthisweek", is meant to multimonitor set-ups with a bunch of apps in preset places. Use spaces/missioncontrol. Personally, I don't get full-screen apps at all and wish this feature would die a painful and horrible death. I'd love to see stats on its use, as I've never seen anyone who actually knows what its cryptic icon represents.

mdonahoe 14y ago
I use it almost exclusively on my 11" air. With limited screen space it is very helpful. And swiping directionally between fullscreen apps is more intuitive than cmd-tab. But it is total garbage on a large screen, so I don't use it when docked.
- CubicleNinjas 14y ago
  This is very helpful. I guess it is for smaller screen sizes. It makes sense now. Thank you!
mikerastiello 14y ago
I agree, I don't get the appeal either. I never use it on my 13" MBP, whether it's just the laptop or if I have it set up with an external 24" as a second monitor. On my 27" iMac the only time I have a window maximized is when I have iPhoto open. However, the window is maximized, I'm not in fullscreen mode.
pooriaazimi 14y ago
I use it on my 15" MacBook pro all the time, and really enjoy it. I don't have external displays, so it's a great thing for me. But as others have said, with an external display attached to yor Mac, it's absolute garbage.
xentronium 14y ago
> Fullscreen is meant to focus you on one app. My common use case is opening text editor in fullscreen on main display and terminal with tests and tail -f log on the secondary one. Using Lion's fullscreen mode could help me get some extra screen estate for the editor, were it done right. Also, why force turning off the displays? After all, one can press the power button or dim it using brightness settings, if the need arises.

dguaraglia 14y ago

Wow, apparently some people are so blinded by fanboyism (I know one such person myself) that they can't accept something created by Apple might have an issue. Some of the answers can be summed up as "hey, before you couldn't do X before, so stop moaning and keep doing what you did before if you don't like how X works!". Even in the bad old days of Microsoft MVPs you didn't get answers as hostile as that. This is almost religious fervor. WTF?

JacksonGariety 14y ago
At WWDC, they showed that Mountain Lion would enable multi-monitor fullscreen support. But yes, they shouldn't expect Apple to be their friend and hold true to their word.
- delinka 14y ago
  "Friend"? No. Stand by their word? I expect that form everyone but am often disappointed. Don't say things you don't intend to follow through on. It makes you untrustworthy. This is probably why Apple stays mum on everydamnthing - the individual employees might mean well, might think something is fully plausible, but then business agendas change, contracts get in the way, and ultimately the corporation doesn't deliver. Easier to just keep your mouth shut and deliver what you deliver. Do I trust people to keep their words? Not immediately - first we try, then we trust.
  - dguaraglia 14y ago
    I think you are missing the point. I think Jackson actually meant the last bit as sarcasm.
- masklinn 14y ago
  > At WWDC, they showed that Mountain Lion would enable multi-monitor fullscreen support But that support is still garbage. Slightly less than Lion's, but still: "multi-monitor fullscreen support" only means that applications will go fullscreen on the (physical) screen they are currently on rather than move to the primary screen (which for a laptop is the "internal" one, making your 27" Cinema Display a very nice mirror and not much else) as is the behavior in Lion. Fullscreen Mode will still only allow you to use a single physical screen.

nestlequ1k 14y ago

I can confirm it's still busted. After a year of Lion I've learned never to bother with the full screen button (that's a feature for noobs anyways right?) Though what really pisses me off about Mountain Lion multiple monitor is they removed the "Detect Displays" menubar option. Just gone. So now I'm reduced to unplugging and replugging my thunderbolt 27inch display when I connect it to my laptop. F'ing asinine

thehigherlife 14y ago
This may fix your problem: http://code.google.com/p/detectdisplays/ http://code.google.com/p/detectdisplays/
- nestlequ1k 14y ago
  Awesome, just what I needed. Thanks!
jjcm 14y ago
I personally use cinch to do window management (or at least arrangement) on osx. Mimics Windows' Aero Snap functionality, and does it pretty well. Never had a need for the zoom button.

zheng 14y ago

I have no reason to upgrade to ML. I don't really use my Air all that much, but if they fixed this I would upgrade in a second. Too bad.

vertr 14y ago
ML is noticeably faster and smoother across the board. That's a great reason.
- crag 14y ago
  Then ML should be free; "faster and smoother" sounds like bug fixes to me.
  - danbee 14y ago
    I'm pretty sure that "faster and smoother" isn't all you get.

podperson 14y ago

The other annoying aspect of this is that there are (hidden?) APIs for making apps functional in fullscreen mode across multiple monitors. Aperture (for sure) and Final Cut Pro X (I believe) both make use of multiple displays.

X-Istence 14y ago
I've noticed that in Mail.app for example, if you show the connection doctor, or status or even the address list (Window -> Address panel) while in full screen you can happily drag those across to the secondary/empty screen and they will stay there for the duration of the app being full screened. I don't think a special API is required, just knowledge of the second screen and then placing windows on that second or third screen.
gunnarsteinn 14y ago
Parallels also works on multiple monitors in fullscreen mode so it can't be a hidden API. But still, you can't have one app fullscreen on one monitor and another app in the other.

xentronium 14y ago

I solved this problem very easily, by downgrading to Snow Leopard. Also that got rid of kernel panics caused by a bug in Darwin virtual ttys. The worst part of Lion's featured 'fullscreen mode' is that software, that worked fine in fullscreen before, now uses Lion's fullscreen. This doesn't happen on Snow Leopard.

dguaraglia 14y ago
The problem with this approach is that a bunch of apps in the App Store, unaccountably, ask for Lion+. I can't see what particular API feature they are using that requires a full OS upgrade, but the last 5 applications I was ready to pay for weren't compatible with Snow Leopard.
- gurkendoktor 14y ago
  Lion uses versions instead of files (which is its own can of worms). Maintaining support for both sounds like a pain, actually.
zyb09 14y ago
Don't you need Lion for the latest Xcode these days? If you're not doing anything in Xcode you might as well boot Linux (or Windows :).
- xentronium 14y ago
  Unfortunately for iOS developers, yes, you need Lion for latest XCode. Compiler toolchain and other stuff is available via older xcode or gcc-osx-installer project, though.

wdewind 14y ago

Honestly, I think the suggestion of hitting the green button to maximize is completely fine. Except that the green button DOES NOT MAXIMIZE. And never really has. Window management in OSX has always been a complete joke, and it continues to be so. Now pressing the green button in chrome resizes to small and "current" sizes, not "full screen."

masklinn 14y ago
> Honestly, I think the suggestion of hitting the green button to maximize is completely fine. It definitely isn't fine when your goal is to maximize content visibility and remove as much chrome as possible, which is the reason you'd put a video player, image reader or web browser in full-screen. > Except that the green button DOES NOT MAXIMIZE. The purported role of the zoom button is to fit the window to the content, but shift-clicking it should maximize. It does so in all the applications I use except (strangely enough) Cocoa Emacs. But that is not fine because it leaves all the chrome around, where the point of full-screen modes is to remove that and potentially re-layout the display to make better use of the now chrome-less canvas.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
I love angry rants from people that think every window manager has to act like Windows. It's a zoom button, not maximize. If you simply Shift-Click you will get the expected effect. There are half a dozen tools that will change the default behavior if you require it.
- Timothee 14y ago
  But I don't know what "zoom" means in the context of a window. And the inconsistencies of my experiences with various apps didn't make it clear either. (e.g. the infamous mini-player for iTunes) As for Shift-Click I tried it with Chrome and I thought you had made my day. However it didn't do anything different on Messages, nor Safari: it just stretched the window vertically. In my short survey of currently open apps, half were stretching vertically while the other was doing fullscreen. (be it Shift-click or plain click) Only Chrome acts differently.

spenvo 14y ago

I could care less about Apple's Fullscreen API -- what I hate is that apps are replacing their old Fullscreen behavior (like Chrome has) in favor of the Apple standard. Which led me to make this comment on a Firefox 12 HN post a few months ago: "... it will be a shame when they implement full screen if it takes away the current layered option. Firefox is the last major OSX browser to work in fullscreen while still allowing apps to be above or below it. With Moom's hotkeyed window positions--it's extremely convenient to bring a text editor to focus and still be able to scroll the web in the background. Mozilla, please don't let this happen!" Apple's Fullscreen API just seems like a lazy approach to delegating UI real-estate and the last thing power-users would want.

runjake 14y ago

I (mostly [1]) get around this by using SizeUp and its "full screen" keyboard shortcut to maximize my windows. I'm sure Divvy and other tiling window manager software have an equivalent. http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/ http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/ [1] I say "mostly" because it just maximizes the window and doesn't put the app into Apple's Fullscreen API mode.

nchlswu 14y ago

I've never found built in apple features to typically handle dual monitors too great. Sure, multi monitors is fine, but the Spaces and Mission Control UX never scaled well when you added another monitor (IMO). Full screen behaviour just adds to it. It seems to me that >1 monitors are not how Apple envisions their computer configs.

Synaesthesia 14y ago

The way I think they justify this (and I do), is that if you have multiple monitors, then you generally have lots of screen real-estate, and thus won't be using fullscreen mode anyway. I don't, because apps are too big on 24" - fullscreen is best on a small notebook display. I still think Apple should change it though.

jonhendry 14y ago
There are some apps it makes sense with, like video, or music, or drawing/painting, or 3D modeling. Or even two-page spreads in Preview.
- tikhonj 14y ago
  Or, most importantly, Emacs! I don't know where I'd be without a full-screen Emacs.

srik 14y ago

This is not a bug. It is a very intentional feature, like the scroll bars, they decide they had to go against the norm to implement it and they went aead with it. The intended use case is to allow the app access to both the screens. Imagine this in say a video editing environment where you could have the video playing on the left and all the myriad number of controls on the right. The problem is, to my knowledge, almost no app has taken to it yet, no one wants to be the first, heck not even apples own apps feel the need to do it. Conjecture-> The problem is unlike scroll bars you can't have a setting to disable it, because that would mean the app had to retroactively allow itself to run in a single window full screen mode which might be considered unpredictable behavior, something they don't like. So to give them some benefit of doubt I see where they're coming from.

dansanderson 14y ago

I agree this behavior of full-screen mode is counterproductive on multi-monitor set-ups, and it's a serious issue if Apple is encouraging app developers to rely on this behavior instead of providing more useful window layouts. It's a violation of metaphor: "full screen mode" is actually "dedicated space mode," which isn't what multi-monitor users expect or want. From personal experience, I suspect this feature is intended to make Spaces more accessible to novice users on laptops without external monitors, a common case. I never got the hang of Spaces originally, but once I started using full-screen mode while portable, my laptop got immensely more useful. For me, this was a gateway into the rest of Spaces, and now I maintain 3 desktop spaces and 1 full-screen app, and switch between them and Mission Control with trackpad gestures. Heck, I might even start using Dashboard, since it's sitting right there. (Ok, probably not.) It's a gradual introduction to an advanced feature. Apple routinely cuts off its long tail as a streamlining measure, sometimes for UX reasons, sometimes for engineering reasons. They shouldn't always get away with it. At least in this case the intent seems reasonable, even if the side effect isn't.

da_n 14y ago

I think this is all related to the iOS X direction Apple is going with their desktops. they would rather force a broken implementation of full-screen which mimics iOS than rethink it for a desktop. And you know, I hate to say it (as a long time user of Apple computers) but in general they really need to pull their heads out of their arses when it comes to the bizarre direction they're going with the OS X user experience. Imaginary linen canvas everywhere? Horrible slow transitions everywhere, all the time? Or maybe I just want to get some god damn work done here. Apple, we know you can do this stuff ever since the days the genie minimize effect was introduced (or shift-minimize for ultra slow!). Please, get some sanity and just put an advanced panel somewhere in the system preferences with, among other things (tabs in Finder?) an animation = slow/normal/fast/disabled option. We should not need to resort to plist hacks.

k-mcgrady 14y ago
I hope that they make OS 11 (or whatever the next major major version of the OS will be) more power user focussed. With the iPad becoming more of a replacement PC for normal users it makes sense they could focus the desktop OS on pro/power users in a couple of years time.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- da_n 14y ago
  I can see such a scenario playing out, I think iOS is by a gaping chasm the proven consumer OS for Apple. I just hope during iOS's continued penetration into the consumer space that they don't mess-up OS X for the actual pro people who want to have nice UNIX based OS with an accessible filesystem etc. Hopefully they will at least give the user more control and options so they can tweak it to their needs/tastes. I am sceptical though. My favourite release of OS X for performance was Tiger, it was rock-solid in my experience and felt lightweight.
  - pyre 14y ago
    > UNIX based OS with an accessible filesystem That's the first time that I've heard of someone praising OS X for its 'accessible filesystem.' Care to expand?

IanDrake 14y ago

I'll probably get slaughtered for saying this, but the more I use OSX and see the really simple stuff that either doesn't exist, doesn't work, or doesn't work well, I end up really confused where most Mac users' complaints of Windows comes from (especially compared to Win7). This comes from working on a '10 MBP with Lion. Full screen is basically like "Maximize" in Windows. To me it was shocking that in 2011 that was touted as a new feature. Other things bother me too, like constantly getting the "beachball" for seemingly simple actions and xcode crashing if I breath too hard. I just assume most people aren't having a similar experience.

dmishe 14y ago
If you work with mac for a while you will 1. get used to it 2. learn the difference in thinking 3. burn the damn machine In the first few monthds i almost did 3, but then 1+2 and i love it since And i'm not saying that fullscreen is broken by design here, it is.
mlwarren 14y ago
I've had similar experiences. A lot of simple things in OSX just don't feel natural or when done give me a result that I didn't expect. I've been using the OS for almost a year now and still feel that way.
majormajor 14y ago
Ever since 10.3, Expose was a fantastic way to manage lots of windows on a small screen (in my case at the time, a 12" Powerbook). Windows never offered anything similarly useful for me until Windows 7's "hover over the taskbar icon to see previews" feature. Then when Apple added Spaces on top of that, the Spaces+Expose combo was even better. I don't understand the desired behavior in Lion at all, though. They took away all-windows Expose (I used to have one corner dedicated to all-windows and another to application-windows) and turned Spaces into this weird hybrid thing with a useless-to-me Full Screen mode... Fortunately, my personal laptop is still on Snow Leopard, and my work machine is used with a couple 24" monitors hanging off of it, so I haven't yet had to use the new way of doing things... But with the recent OS X trends I'm not sure my next laptop will be another Mac.

te_chris 14y ago

I finally upgraded to Lion a few weeks ago because a client I have (I'm a web dev, mostly rails) had an app that was built on Xcode 4.3 that I needed to be able to compile and test. I really miss snow leopard. my computer runs slower now under lion and I'm dubious as to whether the UI improvements improved anything.

teilo 14y ago

Frankly, I don't find the full-screen issue that much of a problem. I use BetterSnapTool to emulate the Windows 7 style drag window to edge functionality. So going full-screen on a window now works exactly like Windows 7. The bigger problem is how it is not possible to drag a window from a "space" on one display, to a "space" in another display when viewing Mission Control. There is no conceivable reason they don't allow this. It worked just fine in Spaces. It has nothing to do with full screen mode. I just don't get it.

wesbos 14y ago
I dont think you are understanding the problem here. Its not with maximizing windows on your monitor, its with having apps go fullscreen while still having access to your second monitor. Currently OSX makes the 2nd monitor linnen.
- teilo 14y ago
  I understand the problem perfectly well. I've used Lion for a long while now. Prior to 10.7 there WAS no fullscreen feature (no universal feature, that is. Individual apps had their own implementations), and I hate how Apple implemented it. Regardless, my point is that a lot of people have been using the full-screen feature as a substitute for full-maximize. I'll gladly sacrifice a quarter inch of screen real-estate to be able to use my external display simultaneously. I actually NEED that menu bar most of the time, anyway.

gavanwoolery 14y ago

You know how I know every operating system is turning into sh_t? The install sizes keep increasing...I could write an operating system with much of today's functionality in probably under 100 mb. With the right system architecture/standardization, I could probably write an operating system under 10 mb. Time for a new operating system. WHO IS WITH ME!? ;)

RivieraKid 14y ago

OS X is the least usable of the desktops I worked on for a longer period of time (Gnome 2 and Windows XP). Mostly because of clunky and slow way of app switching and poor window managment. Unfortunately, "modern" desktops like Gnome 3, Unity or Metro are even worse.

stcredzero 14y ago

I don't use Fullscreen. I have 2 27" monitors hooked up through a Dual Head 2 Go. I use Divvy, which is set up so I can put an app on either 27" screen, or on the left of right of either 27" screen. I find Mission Control to be an adequate Exposé substitute. I don't use spaces.

maerek 14y ago

Holy shit, Apple. It is 2012. Figure out how to do a decent window manager that lets you maximize a window properly.

beedogs 14y ago

Tim Cook is the Steve Ballmer of Apple. And I mean that in every negative way possible. This kind of shit is a great example, but everything he's done since he took over has been a tremendous disappointment. Nobody was clamoring for the iOS experience on the desktop. It's horrible. Get rid of it.

batista 14y ago
Well, I for one, like it. And I have been using OS X since 10.2
nicholassmith 14y ago
You do understand that the decisions made in Lion probably weren't made by Tim Cook? I'm frankly tired of hearing "OH APPLE IS BURNING, IT'S COOK'S FAULT". If everything he's done has been a disappointment why are Apple making more money than ever? And apparently people were clamouring for it, just you weren't.

n-gauge 14y ago

Disclaimer:I have 0 Apple products, Does using a usb powered/driven screen have the same problem? (as they tend to use their own driver IME). I know they are slower to update, but for monitoring use should be fine.

chj 14y ago

that is why i don't use fullscreen