Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

Full Screen Mode, Safari

Once Safari opens, you’re ready for your first full-screen experience.

1. Click the icon in the upper-right corner of the Safari window.

   With a smooth animation, your Mac hides the menu bar and the bookmarks bar. The only thing remaining is the address bar. The window’s edges expand all the way to the edges of the screen (Figure 0-2).

   Tip

   You may as well learn the keyboard shortcut for the Enter Full Screen mode: Control-⌘-F. The same keystroke leaves Full Screen mode, but you can also tap the Esc key for that purpose.

   

   Figure 0-2. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Full Screen mode, one of the flagship features of Lion. The idea is to fight back against the forces of window clutter that have been encroaching on your document windows for years now. Your actual work, your photo or Web page, fills every pixel of that giant screen you paid so much money for.

   You don’t have to panic, though. The menu bar is still available: Move the pointer to the top of the screen to make the menus reappear.

   For the next demonstration, call up an actual Web page, preferably one with a lot of text on it—www.nytimes.com, for example. Now suppose you want to scroll down the page.

2. With two fingers on the trackpad, drag upward.

   If you have a Magic Mouse, drag up with one finger.

   If you just tried this, you’re no doubt frowning right now. You just scrolled down the page by moving your fingers up. That’s backward, isn’t it?

   For your entire computing career so far, you’ve always dragged the scroll bar down to move the contents of the page up—and now, in Lion, Apple swapped the directions. Why would Apple throw such a monkey wrench into your life?

   Well, the first reason is to make the Mac match the iPad/iPhone, where you drag your finger up to move the page up.

   The second reason, frankly, is that the old system never really made sense in the first place. Until now, if you want to move the page to the left, you dragged the scroll-bar handle to the right. If you wanted to move down the page, you dragged the handle up.

   Anyway, you have two choices: You can spend a couple of days getting used to the new arrangement—or you can put things back the way they’ve always been. (To do that, open System Preferences For a trackpad: Click Trackpad, click Scroll & Zoom, and then turn off “Scroll direction: natural.” For a Magic Mouse: Click Mouse, click Point & Click, and then turn off “Scroll direction: natural.”)

   Note

   If you have a non-Apple mouse that has a scroll wheel, then the Mouse preference pane doesn’t offer this scroll-direction option. You can still reverse the Lion scroll-direction logic, though, if you’re handy in Terminal (Chapter 16).

   Just open Terminal and type defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences com.apple.swipescrolldirection -bool false. When you press Return and log out, you’ll find that the time-honored scroll directions have been restored.

3. Find a photo or block of text. With two fingers, double-tap the trackpad.

   These are taps, not full clicks. On the Magic Mouse, double-tap with one finger.

   Safari neatly magnifies the photo or text block to fill the screen, just as on an iPhone or iPad. Neat, huh?

4. Repeat the double-tap to restore the original size. Click a link to visit a different page.

   For this demonstration, it doesn’t make any difference what other Web page you visit. The point is for you to see how cool it is when you swipe your trackpad instead of clicking the Back button.

5. Go back to the first page by swiping leftward with two fingers on the trackpad.

   On a Magic Mouse, use one finger.

   The previous page slides back into view as though it’s a tile sliding back into place. You can swipe the other way, too—to the right—to go forward a page.

Once you’ve accumulated several full-screen apps, and you’ve full-screened them, you can use a similar swipe—with three fingers on the trackpad—to flip among full-screen apps.

(On the Magic Mouse, swipe with two fingers.)