As showcased in Steve Jobs "Back to the Mac" presentation of Mac OS X Lion today, I welcome the trend towards full screen apps on the Mac. Having windows of different apps overlapping was just a daily receipe for A.D.D. waiting to happen...

However the one thing I'm concerned about is dual screen support. And more generally: multiple displays support.

I personally use 3 displays, one center and 2 on the sides. I tend to use one app on each screen. The main thing I'm working on in the center and related stuff on the sides. For example, I might have DreamWeaver for creating a web page in the center. I would then have the Photoshop design on the left and the Safari rendering on the right. (Or... PHPED / MySQL / Firefox ;)

Or I might have my email on one side, my calendar on the other, and some excel or project management thing in the middle. I might even have Excel, and Excel and Excel and want each spreadsheet to fill exactly one screen with no distractions around it.

Now... given everything that has been shown today, I didn't see anything allowing me to imagine full screen apps to function smoothly with multiple displays :'(

It looks more like it's going to be one of these:

  • Either a full screen app on one display while the other displays go dark -- which defeats the purpose of multiple displays... -- and you'll be lucky if the app goes onto the display you actually want it to go to :/
  • Or full screen apps that pan over multiple displays -- which kind of works for the dashboard but would be a bad idea for anything with a document to look at...
  • Or... keep using windows as you were before -- Thank you Lion! :/

One solution I could think of would be to fire up Mission Control indepently on each screen (depending on current mouse position?) and then select what you want on that screen... but... it almost sounds too good to come true... :/

Oh well, we'll see...

Comments from long ago:

Comment from: Connie Cerchione

How do you get full screen display for google?

2011-04-04 16-53

Comment from: Spikey8D

….Or, another option could be for each screen to show adjacent spaces (now that spaces desktops are horizontal only). For example, if you have Desktops 1,2,3,4,5,6 and you have 3 monitors, you would see 2,3 and 4 on each monitor. Gesture left, and all the monitors would shift one space, to 3,4 and 5.

2011-06-06 03-59

Comment from: Dino

Hello,

I just installed Lion on my iMac, that has a second 27’’ display attached.

No true fullscreen -> no Lion

gonna switch back to SL and wait till Apple releases a Lion version that is not just for Macbooks!

Dino

2011-07-23 09-26

Comment from: samuel morris

You guys are goofballs. So don’t use the full screen. Did you think about the fact that you were happy with SL when there was no full screen?

There are tons of great things about Lion, but I guess you’ll have to give it a shot for awhile….. Maybe you guys just can’t figure it out?

2011-08-29 15-12