MacMost Now 205: Go Full Screen

Learn how to make your applications fill your screen. Apps mentioned are iTunes, QuickTime, the Finder, iPhoto, iMovie and even Safari. You can find out more about the Saft program mentioned at http://haoli.dnsalias.com.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Gary Rosenzweig: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today let's learn how to go full screen with a variety of Mac applications.
So one of the things that Windows users complain about when they switch to Mac is that they can't easily go full screen with most applications. It's simply a function key for Windows and almost all applications follow it. 
On Mac, it's a little bit different. Some applications don't go full screen at all, some have kind of hidden full-screen capability and there's others where you have to alter it yourself. Let's go and take a look at a bunch of applications on the Mac and how to take it full screen or as close to full screen as you can.
Now one of the things you may want to do is play video on full screen. Now if you're on iTunes and you're playing video like this podcast in the little video pane at the bottom left or in a window, all you need to do is go to View and 'play full screen' or command f and you'll get your video full screen. 
Now if you're using the Quick Time player to view video, all you need to do there is go to the view menu and go to 'enter full screen' or command f. you could also go to the view menu and use the 'present movie' function, which gives you some options as well. 
Now it goes without saying that two other video applications are by default really, full screen. There's the DVD player, which, of course, will play DVDs full screen or you can bring them back into a window as well. And also Front Row, which is probably the only Apple application that is natively full screen and takes your entire screen over to present video or photos or music. 
Now the Finder also has a full screen mode of sorts. When you use the Quick Look function on a file by control clicking the file and selecting Quick Look or hitting the space bar, then you also have the option to go ahead and bring that preview into full screen mode with the button at the bottom of the Quick Look window. 
Now the preview application also has a full screen mode so you can use preview to view things like PDFs in full screen.
Now iPhoto has a very interesting full screen mode. You can slide some photos in just about any view and then select 'view' 'full screen' and you'll get this full screen view of the photos you've selected and you also get these great toolbars at the top and at the bottom. 
At the bottom you get your normal things that you usually see at the bottom of iPhoto and at the top you get a little view of your photos that you can scroll through. 
What's really going against Apple's dislike of full screen applications is iMovie. The new iMovie 09 has a bunch of different things. First, you can go ahead and select 'Window' 'show projects full screen' or command 6 and you'll get this really interesting view here of your projects kind of in a cover flow at the bottom, an extended cover flow view with some extra buttons. 
You can also select 'Window' 'show events full screen' or command 7 to get a similar view of your events. And then there's also the view play full screen or command G while you're editing something in iMovie.
Now what a lot of people would like to do is take Safari full screen but there's just no way to do that with Safari as it is. Same thing with Firefox. There's some plug-ins that will expand the Firefox window to be almost full screen but not quite. 
However, there is a plug-in for Safari called 'Saft' and this one, if you add it to Safari, will have a full screen most in the file menu and it fills the entire screen up. It also gives you a bunch of different options as to how it works, including getting rid of the toolbars at the top and having even a kiosk mode. 
You can find more about Saft at this web address. It only costs about 12 bucks and in my test it seemed to have some other pretty interesting functions. Apple doesn't really like this whole full screen mode thing and doesn't build it into most of their application, but I find it to be very useful, especially when you want to concentrate on a certain thing. Like it would be great to have mail full screen and just concentrate specifically on getting some of your email answered.
If you've got some other ways to get other applications to go full screen on the Mac, leave a comment at this post at MacMost.com. Til next time this is Gary Rosenzweig at MacMost Now.

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 205: Go Full Screen”

David

16 years ago

Mail will go full screen with the Green Button.

Safari will go full screen with a simple script that can be added to the book marks bar as a favorite.
http://www.davidarogers.com/blog/2008/09/resizing-your-web-browser-on-the-fly/

No Dollars.

rosenz

David: Those scripts are very useful. But that isn't really full screen -- it is just maximizing the window size. They are different things. But is maximum window size is all you need, then these work fine.

Hards

15 years ago

Hi Gary,

There is an awesome app called right zoom which maximizes every window to full screen like in windows. Actually its not an app but it runs in background and we hv to stop the app by using terminal.
You can download it here (http://www.blazingtools.com/downloads.html#RightZoom)

Hope u like it.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 205: Go Full Screen

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 205: Go Full Screen”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information