OS X Mountain 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 to 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 Mountain 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.

   Tip

   Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a keyboard shortcut for bringing the menu bar back—if nothing else, so that you can check your battery level and the time of day? There is—but not one that Apple intended. Just press ⌘-space bar. That’s the keystroke for Spotlight, the Mac’s master search bar—but it also makes the menu bar appear. Press the same keystroke to hide the menu bar again.

   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/Mountain Lion, Apple has swapped the directions. Why would Apple throw such a monkey wrench into your life?

   The main reason is (what else?) to make the Mac match the iPad/iPhone, where you drag your finger up to move the page 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 scroll-direction logic, though, if you’re handy in Terminal (Terminal).

   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 a block of text. With two fingers, lightly 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 an 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.