How do you maximize apple taskbar to 2 monitors?

[flubadub]

"If stupidity got us into this can't it get us out?" W.Rogers

Thats funny, don't you read. I'm not the one bitching here ( no offense, SDAVE ) and I'm well aware of the keyboard commands. The majority of the time thats all I use.
Yet you make it sound like I'm the one who's having a hard time to adjust to OS X, considering it's all I've been using for the past few years.


My apologies I did not mean to bundle you with "the other", mea culpa!

You've hit the nail on the head, there can only be one main screen, and that is nominated by the position blah, blah, but you know all this.

I'll tell you why I get soooo pissed off at people and why I go into detail about my experiences, We learn by trial and error, DUH! Learning comes from mistakes, and to butcher Frost "mistakes not taken"(or should that be not maken?). We can play with the great heavy anvil until it drops on our toe and we have learned, oooor we can watch some other putz do it... you get my drift.
When I was more a fledgling than now I am (?) I used to criuse these damn forums doing "word" and "phrase" search, looking for "enlightenment"! I wanted to learn, but I either found myself in the "Evelyn Wood Speed Reading, Hacking in Hebrew" or in a lively version of "Truth or Dare" where I found four letter words I never dreamed of. Enough on that!

One website that I'll share privately gave me the world: Find some one who's posts you like and find informative and follow those threads, they will lead you to others; soon ,like Cuirious George you will be flying through the treetops (you are already!). Also go to your nearest Apple Store. They naturally would love it if you bought something but that isn't necessary, they offer structured classes on everything they offer and the only ones they charge for are the Pro Apps like "Final Cut" and the like. I promise if you spend twenty minutes, makes no diff the subject or program you willl walk away a happier more knowledgable person. (I used to do it while waiting in line waiting to pay for my new "play-pretty", now it is a great mid afternoon "heat retreat", we got the beta version of global warming early here in LA!)

Hope this was not overly pedantic... any one got any thoughts on why DVD app.4.6.5 keeps crashin' and 'a crashin'? Sumpin' I said, my cologne?

"There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life."
- Frank Zappa
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
- Antoine de Saint Exupery

 

[vandlism]

Can I get the dock now on the bottom of any of the monitors?

The menubar indicates which is the Main Display, and as you already know, this can be changed in Arrangement in Displays in System Preferences by dragging. The dock, like the menu bar, is a function of the main display and will locate onto whichever display you decide to place the menu bar.

Back to the discussion, I never saw the image (didn't load) but I can guess this would be something like Windows where it's one main window with a bunch of things floating inside of it (sub-windows) and it is maximised across two screens. As such, the resolutions of the two displays are equal, but the window doesn't extend to the top because those few pixels are used by the menubar. Got it. I'm not used to this particular situation though I do use FCP across two displays (MacBook and Cinema). I would be one to vote against the use of menu bars on multiple displays. It is the redundancy and an issue of inconsistency (which window on which display takes precedence) that leads me to that conclusion. I would really lay blame on Adobe for dropping the ball on porting the app. I've used Photoshop and I appreciate being able to have independent windows with no application "background" disallowing a view as to what's behind. It's actually my reason for a dislike of the maximise feature in Windows. Anyways, if it were me I would find a way to undock the palettes and windows from the main editing window. I use every bit of screen real estate as possible, and FCP does a great job of resizing and placing for layout.

As far as having menus in every window, that boils down to a key difference of Mac and Windows. In Windows, every window tends to be a process or application of its own and demands menu input. On the Mac, an application can have many windows belonging to it (ala FCP) and its a much more efficient use of space to have one menu bar that accesses the applications commands, rather than multiple menus which each could control the entire application. That gets messy.

A solution looks to be Deja Menu - a throw back to days of NeXT. It doesn't occupy any extra real estate and offers quick access to whatever you may need in the menus. A tip would be to learn key commands, if you already don't. I however, have no problem with one screen menubar. As it is, my main application windows for editing run on my larger main monitor. Palettes and media lists/effects dont require any menu commands so they can live on my smaller MacBook display. Also, I wouldn't do well with a menubar hiding itself. That's an option that might scare new users of the computer. I understand how its a personal preference, but the first time your friend sits down to borrow your computer to check their email, I know what the first question is that they'll ask. New users have a difficult enough time with the hiding dock, as such they make the icons huge and take up half the screen.

 

[SDAVE]

Did someone remove the link to my shortcut or didn't I put it???

 

[vohdoun]

You did put it in, don't ask me how it vanished. There's been no traces of it being edited.

[Edit] It's still there, well the link is http://img296.imageshack.us/img296/3007/picture1fo5.png

Imageshack seems to have moved/removed it, perhaps because you direct linked it and its used up a lot of bandwidth because its a direct link png...

 

[flubadub]

I'd be ready for a rubber room...Hep ME!

Here's the screenshot:

I don't know if you see any of the industry rags like Millimeter or Videography and there are a slew of others. Since I am retired I get them to kind of keep up. I made my living in props and set dressing and designed sets for commercials and rock videos back when H'wood was Video Babylon. Like the sixties, if you remember it you weren't there!
It is awesome to watch an industry so enslaved to a "media" and its strictures and cumbersome processes come to a point where the only moving parts involved will be the actors and crew, I exagerate of course but ity is nearly that. Martin Scorcese, a dyed in the wool "shoot on film and keep your toys away from me" purist, was so impressed with ancillary footage on DV that was "home movied" in he is all but committed to doing a whole project "film free".
I know it sounds like I'm selling magazines or cheap cameras.
When I clicked on your screen shot I thought of an editing suite they pictured a few months ago where they used four 36" LCD monitors with very thin bezels so that when all was said and done there was effectively a 72" diagonal screen!. So you're cuttin' along, la la la, pallates all over the place, knock at the door. Director wants to see an assemblage, can you show it to him on one screeen and continue to work on the others, "he doesn't want to be in your way" (like hell!)" Melt his socks, hit the fullscreen button an play.

That is if you have the power of undiluted money for that setup. However alot of "work" is done on laptop with pared down versions of programs like yours loaded into RAM Disk ( saves battery, the HD barely spins up) while on a plane going cross country! There is a workaround for evreything, except a bad marriage, but that's a different forum!

"Oh Brave New World, that has such people in it!" How truly rich we are...

I will try to post that view for you, keeping with the spirit of reach exceeding grasp

 

[plumpan]

To be fair, windows doesn't do what the few of us want either, I had to get the program Ultramon

http://realtimesoft.com/ultramon/tour/smart_taskbar.asp

This allowed me to have independent taskbars on each monior, so whichever monitor a window was on, it showed only in that taskbar.

Something like this for OSX would be amazing. All it would need to be is a menubar that shows the menu for whatever application is in focus on that monitor. You wouldn't even need to replicate the menubar app icons (like chronosync or stuffit or whatever), or the clock, just have it so there's the white bar with the file/edit/view/... for whatever app is in focus. If you value that screen real estate, make it able to autohide.

That's all someone did for Windows, I'm literally surprised no one thought of it for OSX.

That would be just amazing. I'm not a developer of desktop apps though, so I have no idea how one would accoplish that.

As someone looking to run multiple displays in the future, the issue of menu bars appearing only on the main display has also been one of my biggest concerns. A program such as the one above would really ease my worries. Or even better, Apple should include a feature in a software update, to display an independent menu bar for each display when running multiple displays.

Unlike the common setup, I don't plan on running my multiple displays right next to each other. Physically moving by body to view my main display every time I need to access a menu would be quite annoying.

 

[SteveG4Cube]

You can use something like this to span your entire desktop across two monitors evenly:

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/gxm/products/dh2go/home.php

 

[Skyfarmer]

Just joined the forum here, just ordered my Mac Pro after years of thinking about getting a Mac. Used a Mac in the store the other day, dual 30 inch screen setup. I too found the Menu bar on the 'other' monitor a pain.

Have scanned most of this thread, skipping much of the personal absuse bits. I asked this question on another Mac forum and was shocked at the amount of unpleasant venom produced by this question. Having previously inhabited only CP/M BB's and Windows and Linux forums I had never realized there was such 'feelings' against one group of computer users against users of a different system by some people. Quite shocked actually that people can get so agitated by it all

Wondering if there has been any progress on this ...have seen DejaMenu, any new apps out there for those of us deficient in remembering all but the most common shortcuts.

Asking Apple to develop options to put menu bars in app windows rather than on one screen is no different to asking Windows to gt rid of its individual menu bars and creat a single menu bar...It ain't going to happen, so any devs out there come up with anything new since DejaMenu.