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danistyping

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 8, 2009
181
100
Boston, MA
I just got a 24" Dell IPS display to use with my 2012 13" i7 MBA. It's awesome.

So here's my question/issue. I need to use this as a second display, not mirrored. When I do this, I want to full screen Safari and many other apps. When I click full screen, it goes full screen on my MBA screen, NOT the external Dell display. No matter what I do, I get the grey background pattern on the dell and the full screened app on the MBA.

WHY? It's seriously pissing me off. There doesn't seem to be a way around it unless you mirror, which is not what I need the monitor for. I hope that you guys know of one. It's probably right in front of my face.....

Any insight here is greatly appreciated.
 

jttwm23

macrumors newbie
Mar 7, 2013
3
0
I just got a 24" Dell IPS display to use with my 2012 13" i7 MBA. It's awesome.

So here's my question/issue. I need to use this as a second display, not mirrored. When I do this, I want to full screen Safari and many other apps. When I click full screen, it goes full screen on my MBA screen, NOT the external Dell display. No matter what I do, I get the grey background pattern on the dell and the full screened app on the MBA.

WHY? It's seriously pissing me off. There doesn't seem to be a way around it unless you mirror, which is not what I need the monitor for. I hope that you guys know of one. It's probably right in front of my face.....

Any insight here is greatly appreciated.


Hi,

Try this, and let me know if it works. I'm having secondary monitor issues as well. when you are at the display arrangement window, you can actually move the menu bar from the macbook display to your dell display. This probably turns the dell display into the primary display. It might work, let me know how it goes.

jttwm23
 

Boyd01

Moderator
Staff member
Feb 21, 2012
7,635
4,528
New Jersey Pine Barrens
I think that's how it works. I have a 13" 2011 MBA and use an old 23" Apple Cinema Display (1920x1200). I have the menu bar on the external screen and fullscreen programs such as Safari and Logic work as expected (they fill the external screen).
 

alphaod

macrumors Core
Feb 9, 2008
22,183
1,245
NYC
You need to move the menu bar as previous stated.

This is what annoyed me when Apple removed Spaces and introduced this "full screen" option. Multi-monitor support went out the window.
 

Spoonz

macrumors member
May 16, 2012
53
0
As others have stated, dragging the menubar to the external display will allow you to fullscreen, but I don't see this as a solution since your primary display will just show the grey gradient.

Apple still haven't offered a work-around for this, and the long and short of it is basically that you can't fullscreen anything without making one of your displays useless. The best you can manage is resizing any apps you're using to fill the screen space - bye bye to gesture swiping through your running programs I'm afraid.
 

PBG4 Dude

macrumors 601
Jul 6, 2007
4,256
4,467
As others have stated, dragging the menubar to the external display will allow you to fullscreen, but I don't see this as a solution since your primary display will just show the grey gradient.

Apple still haven't offered a work-around for this, and the long and short of it is basically that you can't fullscreen anything without making one of your displays useless. The best you can manage is resizing any apps you're using to fill the screen space - bye bye to gesture swiping through your running programs I'm afraid.

Actually, if you set up multiple desktops and run programs in "almost full screen", swiping between desktops will swipe both screens, in effect giving you two desktops per swipe.

This should've been fixed for Mountain Lion though, since people started complaining about it in Lion.
 
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