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December 6, 2011
Full-screen mode in Mac OS X "Lion": a solution to the DVD watching problem
Lion's concept of reserving a separate space for full-screen windows is great in principle.
However, this doesn't work so well on multiple-display setups. One example is DVD Player not being able to play a movie on a secondary display.
Even when the external display, such as a projector, is set up as the main display, the user won't be able to do work while projecting the movie.
One idea for a friendly and intuitive fullscreen concept would be to modify the function and appearance of the fullscreen button (top right of window) if the window is on a secondary display. In full-screen mode, the window will then behave as on pre-Lion systems: it will not occupy its own space, and the primary display is retained for regular use. In this mode, the fullscreen window on the secondary display is the topmost layer, and all other displays behave as if the secondary display was not part of the display set. In particular, switching screens will not change the secondary display. (Internally, when the user switches screens, the full-screen window is moved automatically to the new screen and kept as full-screen, top-most layer, so it will appear static. The animation for screen-switching will have to adjusted accordingly.)
This mode of interaction seems conceptually intuitive, even though it introduces a second kind of fullscreen mode. I think it matches the use cases that people have quite well.
Posted by dr at 10:07 PM | Comments (0)