OS X Lion and its implications for web design | Hacker News Reader

OS X Lion and its implications for web design

blog.andycroll.com

15 pointsstuti909 comments

Full screen apps? Seriously? Maybe they made sense on a 15" screen, but when I have dual or triple 20" monitors, I'd want to punch any developer that wants their app to run in fullscreen.

I don't like the trend I'm seeing.

My feeling is that it makes sense for some apps, but not for others. Safari is often an app that people use maximized (even pre-Lion/Win8).

iPhoto? Sure. iChat? Not so much.

Plus that is three whole apps you can run at once on your setup... ;-)

Depends what you have. I talk on iChat in fullscreen, the person on the other end has a screen that is 6 inches bigger and doesn't use fullscreen so he can research at the same time.

What I'd like to see is a tiling window manager to go along with the full screen apps. I love XMonad on Linux, but some apps just don't work very well. Maybe if applications are written to be full screen they'll work well tiled.

I agree. Note that there are multiple things on the Mac App Store that do this already; for instance, I dug up TileWindows (never tried it, no idea if it's the best of them).

It would be nice if windows could be independently told to lose their chrome to make more room, as they seem to in Full Screen, but without actually taking up the whole screen in the process. For instance, why shouldn't I be able to toss 2 or 3 terminal windows on the left half of a display while still having room for regular, non-Full-Screen windows on the right?

Ultimately I think Apple made a good decision by combining Full Screen and Spaces, because they are very similar. Each screenful is essentially devoted to some task, whether that task requires many windows or one, and it's nice to switch between them so easily.

The only question that remains for me is what will happen with 2 displays. I hope Apple has a simple way to place any Full Screen app and/or any Space on either display, where I can switch one display without affecting the other. One of the infuriating things about Mac OS X 10.6 and earlier right now is that a full-screen app on a second display affects the first display in weird ways (e.g. a 2nd display's full-screen mode can be turned off by trying to interact with windows on the 1st display, which seems like a nonsensical restriction).

Tell that to all the Windows users who think they're not really using an app until it's fully maximized to the entire width of their 20" display. Somehow it never seems to occur to them that stretching the background of a fixed-width layout (e.g., most web site designs) to cover all other running apps is actually reducing the amount of visible information on the screen. This is probably why the same subset of misguided individuals cannot understand why the zoom widget in the Mac OS doesn't simply "maximize" a window. Often, the best way to display the most data on the screen at once is to make each window as small as possible without clipping content. That Apple has relented on this point is unfortunate.

I agree with designing for mobile first, makes for a less cluttered UI

Will some people expect some browser chrome? Will some website designers put a back/forward/refresh button on fixed at the top of the screen?

Let us pray that this does not happen.

There is the basic chrome on the fullscreen views (back, address bar etc.) just not so much of the window chrome. ChromeOS-like if you will.

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