Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

Re:Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak by ridiculous_fish on Sunday January 04, 2015 @01:07AM (#8833564)

I worked on the full screen feature in 10.7 through 10.9!

Full screen in 10.7 and 10.8 did render secondary displays useless. But it was a new feature in 10.7, so there was nothing to reverse. You can't take Safari, Mail, etc. full screen in 10.6.

Perhaps there was an app you used that switched from a custom full screen implementation to the system one, and so regressed on secondary displays?

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Re:Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak by yourad_io on Sunday January 04, 2015 @01:45AM (#8833631)

VLC, iTerm (& Terminal? I think), Chrome, Firefox, ... Most things I used had some sort of full-screen mode that was then "hijacked" by 10.7's native full-screen mode. I say "hijacked" because even versions that were pre-Lion would somehow end up using the native "feature".

The thing to reverse would have been the "switch to new workspace when full-screening" - or at the very least make it optional. Certainly not respond "that's a feature" and close as "working as expected" when thousands complain.

I failed to see the value in that feature even with a single screen. An action that used to happen instantaneously now took 1-2s. and a dizzying sliding animation. (Many a flow was lost to toggling full-screen by accident - whereas previously you could toggle/toggle back immediately without losing your mental state - surely you appreciate that as a developer?).

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Re:Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak by ridiculous_fish on Sunday January 04, 2015 @03:07AM (#8833822)

Ok, I get it: you don't like how the system full screen integrates with workspaces, and you were peeved when other apps adopted it in place of their own implementations. Of course Apple did not "hijack" anything: full screen support has always been strictly opt-in. But apps would feel pressure to adopt the system implementation.

Full screen was an effort to make OS X more usable on small displays - recall that the 11" MacBook Air had just shipped. It didn't make much sense for media playback apps to adopt the system full screen mode, especially as it was in 10.7-8.

I would have loved to enable a system mode where full screen windows could coexist in the same workspace as unrelated windows, but this would have been a new feature, not something we could have achieved by reversing anything. And eventually Apple did enable a new mode, which was what shipped in 10.9.

Oh, and if you filed a bug, then whoever closed it as "working as expected" made a mistake. There was a (heavily duped) bug tracking the uselessness of secondary displays in FS, and it was closed when 10.9 shipped. I may even have been the one to close it, I don't remember.

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Re:Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak by bronson on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @01:13AM (#8849165)

Of course Apple did not "hijack" anything: full screen support has always been strictly opt-in. But apps would feel pressure to adopt the system implementation.

This doesn't make much sense, does it? Obviously apps adopt the system implementation. The problem the OP is talking about is that the system implementation became pretty weird, broke some apps that used to work just fine (especially lots of xquartz ones), and thought that the best use for your extra monitors was to just display a dark gray pattern.

Personally, I learned to live with it (sigh, uncheck "displays have separate spaces"), but it does seem like a good example of Apple shoving a half-baked idea out the door.

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Re:Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak by tolmasky on Sunday January 04, 2015 @02:08AM (#8833677)

QuickTime and iTunes. I used to watch tv or a movie on one of my displays while coding on another. Instead I got to watch linen one screen while watching a movie (double whammy here because even showing pure black on the other screen would have been better since at least it wouldn't distract from the video).

I can't specifically recall, but I think the same was true of full screening video content from Safari (perhaps technically a "plugin feature", but maybe html5 video was around?), but QuickTime was 100% an apple regression.

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Re:Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak by marssaxman on Monday January 05, 2015 @03:53PM (#8841077)

I have no idea how the full-screen mode is supposed to work or what it is supposed to be good for; I just know that every now and then I fat-finger something and accidentally invoke it, at which point whatever single window I happened to be using zooms to take over one of my monitors, while the other monitor turns grey and useless. I don't understand how this could ever be a useful feature.

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