On full screen apps

Recently, a new breed of full screen applications have emerged and, from the feedback that reviewers and users have been giving, it seems that it works.

A few months ago I have bought one of those Apple MacBooks that so many people love (me too, btw). On the last couple of weeks, while searching and trying out new software stuff, I've watched the increasing growth of the number of applications for OS X that provide a full screen user experience.

Yes, full screen apps are not a new. We've had them for a long time: games and bunch of screen real-estate hungry applications (such as 3D modeling or movie playing apps). But, apart from those, full screen applications meant going against the traditional GUIs of all operating systems. Things such as window managers, APIs, usability guidelines, etc., have been tightly tied and cooperative in order to deliver better user experiences. Whether we talk about applications, windows, or documents, all UI metaphors are evolving towards interacting with several windows, in order to accomplish a given task. We do it everyday with our beloved and almost impulsive Alt/Command+Tab task switching.

Even with OS X's window manager, everything is centred around easily finding a window, viewing them all, etc. with all the fancyful animations of Exposé. So, what happened to users that they started to demand for full screen applications?

Back to OS X applications and their... fullscreen-ness, I've come across with applications that see full screen as a competitive advantage, regarding their competitors, such as: Adobe's Lightroom; Apple's Logic, iTunes on cover flow mode, OS X'sDashboard, or Front Row; Scrivener; Writeroom; and the list goes on, and on, and on...

But why?

Well, from this small list of applications we see that some lean towards multimedia (iTunes et al.), others to media editing (Lightroom, Logic), or to text editing (Scrivener and Writeroom). From crawling through blog posts, mailing lists archives, tech news sites, etc., I believe that this new breed of applications fill an important usability gap: attention. With the increase of screen real estate and better window managing, users are bombarded with information coming from everywhere. Things such as Growl notifications, instant messaging blinking or jumping icon notifications, etc. This is, IMHO, increasingly overwhelming to users. Users and getting tired of this.

That's where full screen comes along.

Full screen applications tend to be more imersive. The user is simply centred on fulfilling a task. Nothing gets in between this scenario. No distractions. No bells and whistles around. Consequently, productivity increases. It seems to make sense, doesn't it? I like it and use it, a lot.

Well, from some reports elsewhere, Apple is bringing support for developing full screen apps into OS X's latest installment, Leopard (a.k.a., 10.5), thus dismissing a few full screen hacks that one can find with a bunch of Google queries. Good for us, developers and users.

Finally, as this blog is geared towards Web related user experience, here's a thought. Do we see a clash between the Web's multi-window/page/site hyperlinkingness and full screen metaphors as a weakness when we begin to think on applying this concept to Web browsers, or even to the way websites are designed and how users should interact with them?

In times, I've prototyped a Web multimedia database/hyperbase, whose user interface was specifically optimized for a full screen Web environment (through a Firefox full screen add-on), with good results. Maybe this will be a trend for future Web based applications.

I'll think about it more seriously. For sure.