Friday, November 18, 2016

Full Screen Is a Preference

Joe Cieplinski:

The isRestorable property in macOS conveniently saves window position between launches without much effort for developers. Unfortunately, isRestorable doesn’t have any knowledge of whether the app is in full-screen mode. It would be nice if Apple provided a simple checkbox for remembering full-screen status in IB somewhere.

Meanwhile, on behalf of Mac laptop users everywhere, allow me to plead with my Mac developer friends: When I put your app in full screen and keep it that way, I’m showing intent. And good developers always pay attention to a customer’s intent, and use it to anticipate their preferences. Consider taking a few minutes on your next version to implement saving a preference for running the app full screen. It’ll go a long way to making your customers happy.

The Apple apps that I just tried this with (Mail, Safari, Xcode) all remembered full screen status, as did OmniFocus. But I see an NSIsFullScreen key in the Saved Application State’s windows.plist file. So I wonder if there isn’t some framework support for this after all.

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