OS X Lion dual screens

[talmy]

Having fullscreen mode working on several displays has several problems, mainly in switching them. How would you switch them in Mission Control? How would you switch them with mouse gestures.

Currently you see the all the desktops on all the monitors in Mission Control. Clicking on any desktop changes them on all monitors. So you decouple it -- click on a desktop on the "left" monitor and only the left monitor changes desktops.

As far as mouse gestures are concerned. Lion also got rid of that icon in the title bar that allowed choosing a space. Just bring it back. If it's good enough for most Linux distros and Solaris for the past decade+ it should be good enough for OS X.

I think what they really need is an implementation that combines full screen and spaces, meaning that you assign apps to a certain space and when you full screen them they are full screen in that space but don't show as separate full screen apps.

Which is what we had in Snow Leopard!

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The bottom line is that Apple doesn't really care about multiple monitor support. Having run multi-monitor Windows for about 10 years and OS X for 5, OS X has always failed in comparison.

 

[kasakka]

And how exactly is that a big problem?

How would the system know which one you've got selected? Based on which screen your cursor is? Which screen the currently selected application is on? Clicking the desktop on the second display? What if you want to use the keyboard to switch apps on display 2 while you're working on display 1?

Which is what we had in Snow Leopard!

We didn't have fullscreen mode for anything but video players really. The 3rd party solutions probably do what I meant.

 

[nabbet]

How would the system know which one you've got selected? Based on which screen your cursor is? Which screen the currently selected application is on? Clicking the desktop on the second display?

Application focus doesn't have to change any other way than normally. Why should it?

What if you want to use the keyboard to switch apps on display 2 while you're working on display 1?

Sure. Why should that be a problem?

We didn't have fullscreen mode for anything but video players really. The 3rd party solutions probably do what I meant.

Sure, we had. The ones I've used extensively are Fusion, Aperture and CoRD - but I'm sure there are plenty of others. Application focus works like you would expect, the active window is the active window - regardless of which 'desktop' I'm working on. The same rules apply.

Your brain is still locked in single application, single monitor mode.

 

[talmy]

We didn't have fullscreen mode for anything but video players really.

??? Full screen mode for virtual machines (Parallels, Fusion, VirtualBox), Microsoft Remote Desktop, Aperture, Pages, Keynote and Powerpoint (for presentations). I'm sure there are more I'm missing.

 

[dusk007]

Anybody used BetterTouchTool in SL
When one enables the snap to screen feature it works absolutely flawless with multiple monitors.
The whole full screen support is useless of course as pretty much any Lion feature. I still haven't switched the only thing I like about Lion are some of the GUI changes. Like grey icons and semi visible scroll bar but everything else is either bad or worse.
Even the Version control I prefer to do the way I have done it till now. For programming with support that I know how it works and for anything else the manual way.
Resume has the potential of being useful but it often is also more trouble than it is worth, and really late too considering how often one actually needs to shut down an app with current RAM prices and most people never shutting down for anything but updates.

 

[talmy]

Anybody used BetterTouchTool in SL
When one enables the snap to screen feature it works absolutely flawless with multiple monitors.

Works fine in Lion as well.

The whole full screen support is useless of course as pretty much any Lion feature.

Still BTT is no substitute for a true full screen mode. At least one that works.

Even the Version control I prefer to do the way I have done it till now. For programming with support that I know how it works and for anything else the manual way.

I've done enough with autosave/version/resume that I'm liking it. Versions is a natural extension of the way TimeMachine works. If you don't currently use TimeMachine I can see how Versions might be awkward.

Resume has the potential of being useful but it often is also more trouble than it is worth, and really late too considering how often one actually needs to shut down an app with current RAM prices and most people never shutting down for anything but updates.

Hard to parse this sentence. Resume seems to be a natural given abundant RAM, but why is it more trouble than it is worth? Only trouble I've seen is closing documents with command-Q rather than command-W. In other words, you *never* want to quit an application with command-Q in Lion unless you really want it to relaunch exactly where it was.

 

[Chase R]

Well Lion pretty well crippled the experience of running an external display. For one, you can't full screen a movie, or any app for that matter, to an external display, and two, the external display becomes useless when switching spaces.

How can Apple market and sell an external display for Macs when it is near useless?

Please fix Lion!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[talmy]

Well Lion pretty well crippled the experience of running an external display. For one, you can't full screen a movie, or any app for that matter, to an external display, and two, the external display becomes useless when switching spaces.

How can Apple market and sell an external display for Macs when it is near useless?

Please fix Lion!!!!!!!!!!!

The only thing Lion subtracts is the ability to use both screens when running an app in the new Lion full screen mode. You can make the external display the primary display by moving the menu bar to it in Display Preferences, then all full screen apps will use the external display. Or you can use another program line VLC which will go full screen in whichever monitor you run it in. And while moving apps between monitors is not possible within Mission Control (it was in Spaces) changing spaces will change the apps in all screens just like before.