Full-Screen Apps on OS X Lion

Lions & Lion Cubs

The developer preview of OS X Lion is out. I’m going to resist “cage” puns and focus on one of Lion’s new features: full-screen mode.

Recently I’ve started using most of my regular apps in what I would, until now, have called full-screen mode. On my Mac, running Snow Leopard, this means that the active application window grows to fill the desktop area — its border and title bar remain visible, as does the menu bar, but after entering this mode I can no longer see the desktop or other windows behind my application. The effect is “fill-desktop” rather than true full-screen.

I’m not going to be picky though: “fill-desktop” is a great way to reduce distractions and it almost harks back to my MS-DOS days. It’s weird that interface design is coming full-circle in this respect: we’ve moved from one app on screen at a time, to many apps in many windows, and back to (the option to have) one app on screen at a time.

Of course this isn’t a return to one-app-at-a-time systems: even if the app you’re using fills the screen, you’re one click/tap/gesture away from any of the other apps you’re running in the background. Even the iPhone and iPod Touch — the smallest and least powerful of Apple’s computers — have this ability.

So: we had one-app screens, then many-app screens, and now with Lion we have one-and-many-app screens. It’s a nice Hegelian synthesis. And so I thought I’d look into exactly what’s possible with full-screen mode in Lion.

My first thoughts — and yours too, probably — were “how do I run an app full-screen?” and “which apps can I run full-screen?”. The original Lion announcement provides a simple answer to the first question (at about 1:04:00): all you have to do to switch an app into full-screen mode is click the green “maximise” button in the title bar.

Watching that announcement again earlier today, I thought that the answer to my second question was “any app”. It looked like a click of the green button would take any app on Lion into full-screen mode. But I was wrong.

Today Apple updated their Lion preview page. Here’s a quote from the full-screen section:

Systemwide support allows third-party developers to take advantage of full-screen technology to make their apps more immersive, too.

The key word there is “allows”: apps can take advantage of full-screen mode if they want to, but they have to want to. If we head down to the foot of the page, we get confirmation in the form of a footnote:

[Full-screen mode is] Available with apps that have been developed to work with Lion.

In other words, Apple’s own apps will work full-screen with Lion from day one. Third-party apps will need to be updated to use “full-screen technology”. Don’t you just hate those sneaky footnotes?

This is a shame, because I was hoping that my favourite apps would automatically take advantage of full-screen mode once they were running on Lion. But apparently I’ll need to wait for updates.

I’m not complaining though: Lion is full of good stuff and I’m just happy that I don’t have to develop on Windows. But I’m looking forward to the day when I go full-screen for real, and lose myself in my work.

Update: Frederic Lardinois has a nice review of the Lion developer preview, including details of toolbar icons you can use to take an app full-screen (and back again).

Image from fortherock on Flickr