Wow, apparently some people are so blinded by fanboyism (I know one such person myself) that they can't accept something created by Apple might have an issue. Some of the answers can be summed up as "hey, before you couldn't do X before, so stop moaning and keep doing what you did before if you don't like how X works!".
Even in the bad old days of Microsoft MVPs you didn't get answers as hostile as that. This is almost religious fervor. WTF?
I don't see it as fanboyism so much as a reaction to irrational anti-Apple complaints such as "this feature doesn't work therefore I'm not going to buy any Apple product ever again".
Yes, it's a bug. No, it's not a show stopper, and yes there is a perfectly reasonable work around. So the blind people are those who try to blow this up into some kind of crime against humanity and who then call those telling them to get a grip, "fanboys".
This is not just a bug in some feature that used to not exist, this is a regression that Apple took upon themselves completely consciously.
"Full screening" existed before Lion. It worked fine. You could for example run Quicktime or iTunes full-screend in one monitor and do work on another. Then, in Lion, solely to be able to market it as a new feature, they tweaked it to conflate full-screening with spaces and broke the feature for many people that had been happily using it for over 5 years. They could have just added the existing full-screen behavior to the iLife and iWork apps and things would have been fine. They didn't. It is clear that Apple knew they were going to break this feature for people, and did it anyways. (For example Quicktime used to have an option in preferences whether to black out the other screen or leave it usable, this preference was removed in Lion -- someone literally went in and deleted functioning and better code -- this was not some "whoops" mistake).
On top of this, what is particularly infuriating about this is that it hurts the people that have invested heavily into Apple by purchasing more than one monitor, many times expensive Apple monitors. It is completely acceptable and expected for people to get angry about regressing their monitors' abilities. Maybe its not a show-stopper for you, but for people who have spent a lot of money purchasing monitors, and had an existing workflow that functioned for YEARS, to all of a sudden lose it to a paid upgrade is 100% what I would call a show-stopper. Especially because it has been a year now and it is clear Apple just doesn't care about this.
"Well Apple is just more focused on the single screen experience now and you're just not important anymore". Bullshit. They repeatedly advertise, and continue to advertise the expanded capabilities of, multiple monitors: http://www.apple.com/displays/. The Air + Secondary Display is widely used, and most the laptops now support more than one external monitor. Thunderbolt even added daisy-chaining of monitors. This adds to the absurdity and schizophrenic nature of the issue: many pros use multiple monitor setups, and yet Apple went into the pro apps and degraded them to now only work with one monitor in full screen mode.
Of course, this shouldn't be surprising, its really a microcosm of the entire Lion release: very little to no new functionality and instead unneeded "tweaking" of existing behavior. We paid to have our scrollbars made to look like iOS and have everyone learn to "reverse" their scrolling, for Safari to perform the worst its ever performed (I don't think I know anyone who uses it anymore), and to have full screen broken.
"Full screen" mode existed before Lion (10.7), but prior to 10.6 the API did not exist. There are actually three ways to do full-screen in OS X:
1) Use Core Graphics to capture the display,
2) Manipulate window properties to get the result you want, or
3) Send the toggleFullscreen message to a window (10.6+ only).
Let's ignore option #1. It's primarily useful when you need to change the screen resolution without affecting other applications.
You say that the feature was deleted from Quicktime, but that's not what happened. Quicktime 7 and Quicktime X have different code bases. Quicktime 7's fullscreen functionality predate the current fullscreen API, and so there's a chunk of code in the Quicktime 7 player itself to futz around with window levels, types, desktop modes, and animate the whole thing. The Quicktime X application uses a different framework for video AND a different framework for the GUI, I doubt that you could bring much code from Quicktime 7 to Quicktime X.
Quicktime 7 used the old Quicktime library with Carbon. (So the API it was using to go fullscreen is even deprecated!)
Quicktime X uses the new Quicktime framework with Cocoa.
I myself have implemented the "nice" fullscreen technique, it requires some extra code but allows you to decide whether to allow other applications above yours.
I don't care if the feature broke because QT 7 and QT X have completely different code bases or because they removed the correctly functioning code. Either way it's broken and it's really fucking annoying.
No, it's not a bug. A bug would be something not working as intended. This clearly works just as intended, since some fullscreen apps apparently can use the extra monitor for secondary windows. It just isn't a very good feature if you have multiple monitors.
Personally, I'd love it to work on my dual monitors.
And those complaints are, in turn, a response to overwhelming pro-Apple advocacy. It seems people are content claiming that Apple makes the best software that is clearly superior to Windows and Linux(!), and then surprised when others point out glaring deficiencies in OS X.
I always see such complaints not as "wow, OS X is completely unusable" but as "wow, OS X is not better than (Windows|Linux)". It's no crime against humanity to make a mediocre operating system--just don't go around claiming that it is by far the best!
I'm curious what the perfectly reasonable work around is. Does it let me run 2 apps full-screen on 2 monitors (something Windows does without any issues whatsoever)?
The one and only workaround is "don't use fullscreen mode" so it definitely isn't going to let you run 2 apps full-screen because it's not going to let you run any application alongside a fullscreen one in the first place.
> something Windows does without any issues whatsoever
That is not entirely true, depending how the fullscreened application is coded interacting with the other one may e.g. make the windows toolbar reappear, or (very common for games) minimize the fullscreen application.
I really wish Windows apps had more consistency in their fullscreen behavior. Sometimes they bring up the taskbar, sometimes they behave like normal windows, sometimes they don't even let you scroll off the side anyway. This last behavior is most annoying in strategy games when I'm scrolling the map and have to use the arrow keys for one of the directions, but equally annoying in some FPS games where the cursor scrolls off the side but still behaves normally until you click to fire and then the application loses focus.
I'm not even a Mac user but I would take a consistent but irritating behavior over an inconsistent and also irritating behavior. It's more inconvenient to have to disable my second monitor while I'm playing a game.
I've found that Dota2 has a very good implementation for multi-monitor behavior. When you're in a menu or waiting to find a game in queue, you can move your mouse off to the second monitor, and click on something and the game will minimize. When you're in game, the game captures the cursor, and doesn't let it move to the second screen unless you alt-tab out of the game window.
This is downvoted, but I think there's some smartness to it.
My experience with the Mac is that apps for it are more often geared to work in not-full-screen windows; my personal hypothesis (with absolutely no documentation or backing) is that more Windows apps are most comfortable to use when maximized (and thus many new-from-Windows users look for a maximization button) because of MS-DOS' full-screen ancestry. In support of this unsupported theory: many more Mac apps seem to look silly when resized to unexpectedly large dimensions than do Windows apps.
Full-screen apps in Lion are a bit of a different thing because they exist in a conceptually separate place from "maximized" windows — they are to the side of the desktop, not on top of it.
Does Windows even have something akin to the full screen mode that is provided in Lion/Mountain Lion? Because as a long time Windows user and recent Mac switcher I am not familiar with it.
On the Mac you can run multiple windows and have them all maximised to take up the maximum amount of screen real estate + applicable chrome.
Windows might not, but KDE certainly does. It lets you make any window full screen, which gets rid of the borders and makes it take up the whole screen (whichever one it happens to be on). Moreover, it also lets different programs customize their full-screen behavior: for example, Chrome and the Dragon Video Player both have their own full-screen modes.
And this still lets you use all of your screens. It's great.
I could see something like XMonad confusing people just because it's so different.
But KDE? Not so much. It's designed to be elegant and easy to use, and I think it's fairly successful. It's actually rather easy to go from Windows to KDE--even easier than Windows to OS X, I think. (Admittedly, this is in large part because KDE is similar to Windows in a lot of ways.)
Also, full screen isn't a confusing feature :P. And, of course, Apple is just as happy to confuse people as anybody else--it seems half their users are vague on what exactly the green button does!
This whole thread is a perfect example of irrational anti-Apple hatred. There is no news here, the thread being referenced is over a year old and the most recent page is splendidly off-topic. So bringing it up now is nothing more than a pre-pubescent "look, here is Apple being sucky" whine.
> Even in the bad old days of Microsoft MVPs you didn't get answers as hostile as that.
Um, sure you did (probably still do, I just don't move in those circles any more). I've seen IT managers have visceral reactions against the mere suggestion that Macs might do a better job of anything than Windows.
Some of the people I work with are like that and some others are mac evangelists. Is funny when they meet and shout at each other. I prefer to just use lots of different OS's and like always having a few spare machines lying around that I can wipe and install stuff on, so don't really see what all the fuss is about. If people really cared they'd go out and code better GUIs.
However, it is stupid that apple make some fairly basic design mistakes in the GUI experience when they focus so well on the physical aspects of their devices, but then again, none of the major players has done GUI really well yet, especially when compared with some of the best output of the computer games industry.
At WWDC, they showed that Mountain Lion would enable multi-monitor fullscreen support. But yes, they shouldn't expect Apple to be their friend and hold true to their word.
> At WWDC, they showed that Mountain Lion would enable multi-monitor fullscreen support
But that support is still garbage. Slightly less than Lion's, but still: "multi-monitor fullscreen support" only means that applications will go fullscreen on the (physical) screen they are currently on rather than move to the primary screen (which for a laptop is the "internal" one, making your 27" Cinema Display a very nice mirror and not much else) as is the behavior in Lion.
Fullscreen Mode will still only allow you to use a single physical screen.
These were features that were removed from Apple's apps with the release of Lion. You can understand that people would be upset. Something worked, a specific way, and then when a new release of the OS comes out and the software is updated, suddenly, it has suddenly removed features you'd used in your daily work flow. It's not as if this idea, this concept never existed.
> when other platforms don't even offer it in a single screen?
They do though, and they do it well, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
"Friend"? No. Stand by their word? I expect that form everyone but am often disappointed. Don't say things you don't intend to follow through on. It makes you untrustworthy. This is probably why Apple stays mum on everydamnthing - the individual employees might mean well, might think something is fully plausible, but then business agendas change, contracts get in the way, and ultimately the corporation doesn't deliver. Easier to just keep your mouth shut and deliver what you deliver.
Do I trust people to keep their words? Not immediately - first we try, then we trust.
I know most aren't, but the few that are are so annoyingly vocal it taints the whole community.
The guy I'm talking about will argue with you (and get very pissed off) if you ever criticize anything made by Apple. "Hey, I think feature X on device Y works better than the iOS/OS X equivalent" will get you a 2 hour discussion on why Apple's version is better and, if it isn't, it shouldn't be and the other version is flawed because it does more than it should do.
Whatever marketing Apple is doing, they are certainly doing a great job at making users (well, at least some of them) identify with the brand.
Which really is terrible. I own a Mac, it's my primary machine but I get plenty of use out of the Windows and Linux dual boot machine I also have. Every OS has it's own advantages, and fanboys need to accept that already.
I could not agree more. I use a MacBook at work, Windows at home, and various Linux machines (mostly through ssh). I find each one has it's own pros and cons and I'm comfortable working with any of them.
Even in the bad old days of Microsoft MVPs you didn't get answers as hostile as that. This is almost religious fervor. WTF?