OS X Mountain Lion: The Missing Manual

Full-Screen Apps, Mission Control

You’re still in Safari, right? And it’s still full screen, right?

But if Safari is full screen, how are you supposed to get to other open programs? That’s what you’ll find out in this exercise. You’ll get to see what it’s like to run multiple full-screen apps.

1. Pinch your trackpad with your thumb and three fingers.

   Launchpad appears, at your service. (As you may recall, this doesn’t work on the Magic Mouse, so if you’re trackpadless, you’ll have to exit full-screen mode and then click Launchpad on the Dock.)

2. Find Calendar.

   You may have to change Launchpad “pages” to find it. Swipe horizontally with two fingers (trackpad) or one finger (Magic Mouse) to change pages.

3. Click to open Calendar. Make the new window full screen by clicking the in the upper-right corner.

   In theory, you now have two apps running at full screen: Safari and Calendar. Now comes the fun part.

4. With three fingers on the trackpad, swipe left or right.

   (On the Magic Mouse, use two fingers.)

   The full-screen apps slide into or out of view. If you keep three-finger swiping to the right, you’ll see that Dashboard is all the way at the left end of the “channels” that you’re changing. (If it doesn’t work, somebody might have changed the setting to require four fingers in System Preferences.)

   You’ll also discover that any other programs—the ones that aren’t full screen—are gathered onto a single screen, ...