wait, so if I use FULL SCREEN on a dual monitor setup....

[audieddie]

everything on the secondary monitor goes away and just shows the background - rendering a dual monitor setup completely useless.

At least when I boot into win 7 I can full screen one app and use the other screen for other windowed applications that are running. I love osx, but I have NO idea how this one got past the usability studies. I mean, I can move the mouse around the now empty screen, but it is utterly silly to not be able to put either another app full screen there or at least other windowed applications.

And if you drag an app to the secondary screen and make it run full window, it jumps to the primary monitor, which in my case is the mbp.

*facepalm*

 

[gentlefury]

I noticed that too...Lion is really built for laptops

 

[wazgilbert]

everything on the secondary monitor goes away and just shows the background - rendering a dual monitor setup completely useless.

At least when I boot into win 7 I can full screen one app and use the other screen for other windowed applications that are running. I love osx, but I have NO idea how this one got past the usability studies. I mean, I can move the mouse around the now empty screen, but it is utterly silly to not be able to put either another app full screen there or at least other windowed applications.

And if you drag an app to the secondary screen and make it run full window, it jumps to the primary monitor, which in my case is the mbp.

*facepalm*

SL was already doing that with iMac 2007 and vga or dvi output to monitor.

It's not a lion thing, but a stupid x-windowing style thing

 

[audieddie]

SL was already doing that with iMac 2007 and vga or dvi output to monitor.

It's not a lion thing, but a stupid x-windowing style thing

Full screen is a new lion feature. I've had the same setup going back to tiger - it's not an issue I've had before, because OSX never had full screen capability. You could make the window take up the full screen but that's not the same thing.

 

[richpjr]

I can't figure out why they would implement it like they did - why support multiple monitors with a half baked implementation?

 

[cksubs]

I can't figure out why they would implement it like they did - why support multiple monitors with a half baked implementation?

Because Steve only uses one monitor.

 

[gnagy]

This is one of the things that really bugs me about Lion. I have an iMac with an extra 27" display. The 2nd display becomes a $1k table cloth when I place any app into fullscreen more. It doesn't seem like a sane behavior for the OS to do that, but I'm sure it was done on purpose. It takes coding work to render that table cloth (otherwise it would just be a black screen), so someone put some thought into this and figured this was the best solution.

 

[robodude666]

I have yet to upgrade to Lion, but I know that in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, when I fullscreen a Quicktime X video in my secondary monitor the primary monitor does not go black - instead I can interact with it still without the Quicktime X video leaving fullscreen.

The behavior of iTunes, however, is different and follows what is described here - when a video in iTunes goes full screen the other monitor goes completely black.

However, both Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight fullscreened apps do not affect the other monitor.

I personally dislike this behavior, of making the other monitor black out, as it completely defeats the purpose of a multi-monitor setup.

While I do dislike it, I can understand why Apple may have intentionally implemented it this way. If you consider that each full screened application is its own "Space" then it makes sense that you would have one space displayed on your monitor. The purpose of Spaces is to allow for multiple desktops with just one monitor. This wasn't true in Leopard and Snow Leopard, but it makes sense.

The only way I could see full-screen apps in Lion with Multiple Monitor support working would be to show the spaces to the left/right of the primary monitor, but that would be weird especially if those applications/spaces aren't of interest for your current task.

Personally, I may enter full screen on my browser or preview once in a while, but not as part of my workflow.

-robodude666