[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen OS X Lion released last year, one of the features that Apple put a lot of emphasis on was the fullscreen apps that would be coming to the OS. Since then, many apps on the Mac App Store have been updated to support this special display mode. My question is, do people actually use them?
To me, fullscreen apps on any sort of desktop computer seems pointless for the most part. Don't get me wrong, they do help when you're trying to do something without distractions -- like me writing this article in fullscreen Safari for instance -- but the main issue is that they just aren't necessary or useful most of the time.
In the past few weeks, I've been trying my best to start using the fullscreen capabilities of Mac apps only to find that they don't really help anything get done. I think this feature didn't even need to come to the Mac because Macs aren't iPads or iPhones -- they're computers. Putting such a feature in the OS implies that Apple wants to change the way we multitask on our computers. In fact, there's no way at all to multitask with fullscreen apps since you can't have one thing open on top of another.
It's not a bad feature for some things, but I don't see any reason that fullscreen apps should have been brought to Apple's desktop computers -- or even their laptops for that matter. They don't increase productivity unless you really need something to be distraction-free and they completely change the user experience that we've all come to know so well.