18 December 2012

Making applications go Full Screen in Mac OS X Lion

Like many other people I have a Mac machine at home. Mine is a MacBook Air. The form factor is nice but I'm not sure if the os is better than Linux yet. :-)

Anyway, one of the things I really like about OS X is the Full screen mode. On a laptop it is very helpful in using all of the screen real estate. So it is really annoying when some applications don't support this mode.

Google helped me find a solution. The web site osxdaily.com had a tip about a plugin called Maximizer that provides Full Screen mode to applications that doesn't normally support it. It's great.

What you need to do is the following. First you download SIMBL. This is a little helper program that allows cocoa bundles to be used as plugins. Just download the zip-file, open it and install the package inside.
Next you need to get Maximizer. This is a bundle that SIMBL can use. Download the zip-file and open it. Inside you should find the Maximizer.bundle. This bundle needs to be copied into the
 ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins directory. If you chose to install SIMBL for all users on the machine you have to use the directory /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins.

Restart the applications that don't support Full Screen mode and enjoy watching that sweet icon in the top right corner.



Images from wikipedia.org and osxdaily.com