Fullscreen in Mountain Lion still renders second display useless

For instance on one monitor I could flip between email, the specs for what I'm working on, etc in different desktops. The other monitor can have a browser that I'm testing in, my code, etc in different desktops.

You have to drag the menu bar on the diagram onto the display you want to be the primary.

Of course, that fixes one thing, but then your laptop screen is rendered useless instead.

Space 1: Left Monitor - Chrome (Work profile), Middle Monitor - IDE, Right Monitor - Terminal Space 2: Left Monitor - Chrome (Personal profile), Middle Monitor - Itunes and Spotify, Right Monitor - Misc. non work stuff.

If I'm working on two projects, each gets its own space and browser window.

This way I can more effectively tune out Personal distractions.

You can change which screen is the 'primary display'.

:/

- Open a terminal, enter "killall Dock", don't press return yet.

- Surf to HackerNews in your favorite webbrowser ;).

- Hold shift and minimize the window.

- Very quickly switch to the terminal and press return.

Now your browser is stuck somewhere halfway the transition. The nice thing is that you can still use your web browser in its deformed state.

You can fix your web browser by (really) minimizing and then maximizing it.

I agree in a way, and I think we power users (as a whole) are a bit hypocritical. Whenever Apple leaves the most "backward" x% of users behind, it's just cutting stinky slack (no 32-bit, no iSync, no Rosetta...). When the tiny top x% of power users suffer, the iWorld is coming to an end and Apple is at fault.

But there's actually something that we can do: public shaming. Apple has already taken some steps back in 10.8: Ungrouping of apps in MC, pseudo-three-column layout in Address Book, less visual clutter in Calendar and the calendar list panel made it back. If blogs duly ridicule Lion as the Vista of OS X and keep going even after the release of ML, I have hope that Apple will take note. After all, there must be some people inside of Apple who agree with "us" too.

And even economically, Apple should be happy if we buy Cinema Displays or at least more of their overpriced adapters.

Such an important point I thought I would highlight it. On HN there is often talk of "good will" with developers and the effect of that. The fact is good will doesn't trump market opportunity. Market opportunity is like good looks. It gets you the girl (even if you're a dick). Helping the girl with her physics homework gets you good will but won't get you laid.

I keep a lot of apps open at the same time, and I like to keep each one on it's own desktop with a couple minor exceptions.

I don't like the All-In-One version of xcode... not friendly with a small screen at all. Xcode 3, I would keep the doc window on it's own desktop, Interface Builder on it's own, etc... xcode 4 I lost that ability.

I use "fullscreen" mode occasionally; when I do it's usually a web browser or a terminal window. I'd use it more but even in fullscreen mode, I still want to be able to open a terminal window and keep it on top of the fullscreen app. Like for copying an example from the web.

It's too frustrating to do that if I am having to swipe back and forth between desktops...

However, I find "Mission Control" to be perfectly usable. The name is a little dumb, but it's basically just expose with multiple desktop switching added in. What's the "all flash" part you are talking about?

Applause! You brought a tear to my eye. After living a luxuriant Apple-only lifestyle I've had to start supporting PCs again. Re-entering the Junkspace that is Windows has been punishing.

UI completely untouched since 1995. Thickets of new dialog boxes. Incredibly thick layers of shovelware. Grotesque artwork. Limitations that come out of nowhere that require Windows Pro Premium Whatever. IE toolbar/BHO hell. The printer thing alone, sweet Jesus. I literally gave up trying to share a single USB printer to two other workstations over the LAN. It's so unnecessarily difficult it's unreal.

The Mac-o-verse has the same volume of pain, punishment, and failure as the Windows platform, but it usually tends to cluster on the outside of the possibility space. Their failings aren't sitting there in plain view waiting for you to stub your toe.

That part is so true. Running Win7 on my MBA '11 has been the best laptop I've ever had by a large margin. I should say I was routinely buying $2K Windows laptops, not cheap junk, but junk none the less. Hopefully PC makers are serious about stepping up their game.

The only Windows users I need to support are me and my wife with only the newest peripherals, so my experience hasn't been the same. The manner in which the UAC pops up has gotten me a few time though!

I've been consistently disappointed with pretty much every major windows OEM HW maker (with the exception of Lenovo where I just don't like their look and feel). There is something to be said about making people feel good about the HW they're using. Heck, my 2006 white macbook works like a champ and still serves all of the wife's needs (I offered to get her a MBA but she is happy with what she has).

So you are new to this "computer use" thing?

Because shit like that happens _all_ the time, in all OSes, from OS X to Windows to Linux, to NetBSD, to Haiku, to whatever.

It can even have 20 different explanations, besides the OS. "Doing a directory copy to the office NAS". Maybe the network configuration? Maybe the NAS?

For major issues and bugs I can understand the complaints --like the buggy XCode.

But do people (and hackers much more), think it means something to have tiny complains about some one-off annoyance that who knows why and how it happened?

Do I trust people to keep their words? Not immediately - first we try, then we trust.

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.

The guy I'm talking about will argue with you (and get very pissed off) if you ever criticize anything made by Apple. "Hey, I think feature X on device Y works better than the iOS/OS X equivalent" will get you a 2 hour discussion on why Apple's version is better and, if it isn't, it shouldn't be and the other version is flawed because it does more than it should do.

Whatever marketing Apple is doing, they are certainly doing a great job at making users (well, at least some of them) identify with the brand.

However, it is stupid that apple make some fairly basic design mistakes in the GUI experience when they focus so well on the physical aspects of their devices, but then again, none of the major players has done GUI really well yet, especially when compared with some of the best output of the computer games industry.

No, it's not a bug. A bug would be something not working as intended. This clearly works just as intended, since some fullscreen apps apparently can use the extra monitor for secondary windows. It just isn't a very good feature if you have multiple monitors.

Personally, I'd love it to work on my dual monitors.

It's not a bug, it's a missing feature.

"Full screening" existed before Lion. It worked fine. You could for example run Quicktime or iTunes full-screend in one monitor and do work on another. Then, in Lion, solely to be able to market it as a new feature, they tweaked it to conflate full-screening with spaces and broke the feature for many people that had been happily using it for over 5 years. They could have just added the existing full-screen behavior to the iLife and iWork apps and things would have been fine. They didn't. It is clear that Apple knew they were going to break this feature for people, and did it anyways. (For example Quicktime used to have an option in preferences whether to black out the other screen or leave it usable, this preference was removed in Lion -- someone literally went in and deleted functioning and better code -- this was not some "whoops" mistake).

On top of this, what is particularly infuriating about this is that it hurts the people that have invested heavily into Apple by purchasing more than one monitor, many times expensive Apple monitors. It is completely acceptable and expected for people to get angry about regressing their monitors' abilities. Maybe its not a show-stopper for you, but for people who have spent a lot of money purchasing monitors, and had an existing workflow that functioned for YEARS, to all of a sudden lose it to a paid upgrade is 100% what I would call a show-stopper. Especially because it has been a year now and it is clear Apple just doesn't care about this.

"Well Apple is just more focused on the single screen experience now and you're just not important anymore". Bullshit. They repeatedly advertise, and continue to advertise the expanded capabilities of, multiple monitors: http://www.apple.com/displays/. The Air + Secondary Display is widely used, and most the laptops now support more than one external monitor. Thunderbolt even added daisy-chaining of monitors. This adds to the absurdity and schizophrenic nature of the issue: many pros use multiple monitor setups, and yet Apple went into the pro apps and degraded them to now only work with one monitor in full screen mode.

Of course, this shouldn't be surprising, its really a microcosm of the entire Lion release: very little to no new functionality and instead unneeded "tweaking" of existing behavior. We paid to have our scrollbars made to look like iOS and have everyone learn to "reverse" their scrolling, for Safari to perform the worst its ever performed (I don't think I know anyone who uses it anymore), and to have full screen broken.

I always see such complaints not as "wow, OS X is completely unusable" but as "wow, OS X is not better than (Windows|Linux)". It's no crime against humanity to make a mediocre operating system--just don't go around claiming that it is by far the best!

The problem is with the full-screen behavior introduced in Lion. And it does suck, but I personally it very low on the list of annoyances.

I have used 4x simultaneous monitors on my MBP for years, and it's still more comfortable overall than Windows7 (YMMV - Win7's experience varies greatly on your drivers/hardware).

Apple has always had issues with window-management, it's one of those things like lock-screen that Windows still does better in some ways.

Now that I've got it working, though, I have to say that there's something almost liberating about being able to make the window take up the whole screen, without having to dick about any more. Every time I do it, I get a slight frisson, imagining myself sticking 2 fingers up at an oncoming army full of tutting, hissing, ponytailed-and-bearded turtlenecked Apple fanboys, all crying out for my head, "Burn the Windows-loving witch!" Well, dear fanboys, screw the lot of you, and dear OS X, screw you too, and that goes for Safari and iTunes as well. Hey, Safari, I just took your window AND MADE IT TAKE UP THE WHOLE GODDAMN SCREEN... and I don't give a fuck how big you thought I needed to have it.

Considering what the Apple brand is supposed to connote, or at least what I thought it was supposed to connote, I find this kind of ironic.

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.

Wrong. They're from people who think every window manager should act consistently. This is decades of UI design and expected behavior being flushed down the toilet by a company for which NIH is religious dogma.

That Windows behaves the correct, expected way is an indictment on OS X, not its growing base of increasingly frustrated power users.

I still stick to my guns: the default behavior is insane. Focusing on one task (ie: one screen, window, app etc) at a time is the common use case, when I want to show two screens at once it's the exception. Current behavior is based on a philosophical concept of carrying through the "desktop" metaphor, and SJ's obsession with showing off his stacked windows, which mac was first to have, rather than on how humans actually want to use computers.

Compiler toolchain and other stuff is available via older xcode or gcc-osx-installer project, though.

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.