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Make Old Apps Roar on Lion with FullSteam →
A friend and I were discussing the fullscreen feature in OS X Lion. Despite what many have said, we came to the conclusion that it is, in fact, useful; it’s just a different take on the Spaces mechanism, that uses less physical desktop space on the whole.
Games on OS X have often glitchy handling of their fullscreen status, usually due to the previously-poor handling the OS did of it. There’s pop-in of windows, losing your game, not having the game in Exposé or Mission Control, and so on. The one true solution to this is in Lion, which handles fullscreen apps handle perfectly. It’s great. But, sadly, most developers (if they’re even still maintaining the app) won’t do it for a long time. So, I wrote FullSteam. It’s a simple hack that kindly tells and app to shut up and go fullscreen, natively, beautifully, and just a little bit sexily (that’s a joke, for newcomers to my writing style).
Simply download the DMG and follow the 2-step instructions on it, which involve clicking, dragging, and double-clicking. Really difficult stuff.
Currently, the only apps supported by FullSteam are Source games (Half-Life 2, Portal 2, L4D, etc.) and Minecraft. No, it currently doesn’t do Steam, but who can give up such a punny name? Adding support for other apps is trivial.
If you know one you’d like to add, get the bundle identifier (right-click app, Show Package Contents, Info.plist, CFBundleIdentifier) or the executable name (Show Package Contents, MacOS, name of the hacky-looking black boxy thing). Tweet me @zwaldowski or communicate with me in some other fashion. For the more technical folk, this code is open source! Find it on GitHub.
