Plainview is a free full-screen web browser for your mac.

October 27, 2008 4:51 PM

Plainview is a free full-screen web browser for your mac. Until now, you had two options for showing Internet work: capture it all to Quicktime and throw it into Powerpoint or Keynote (looks nice but no interactivity as everything has to be canned) or show it in your browser (interactive but with ugly chrome distracting people from your beautiful sites). So here's a third option. Fire up your full-screen browser and let your audience focus on the work.

Oh yeah, the same guys also made a neat little flash game called Tankageddon and of course the subservient chicken.

posted by krautland (52 comments total)

If they have a mobile version called H.W. Plainview, I am so there.
posted by lumensimus at 4:53 PM on October 27, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

F11?
posted by autodidact at 4:54 PM on October 27, 2008 [7 favorites has favorites]

About freaking time somebody made a browser fullscreen on a Mac. I was getting sick of people being all "If your mac is so awesome how come you can't just hit F11 and make the browser go fullscreen?" Why indeed.
posted by mullingitover at 5:11 PM on October 27, 2008

Opera already can do this.
posted by kickingtheground at 5:14 PM on October 27, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

That's pretty neat!
posted by odinsdream at 5:15 PM on October 27, 2008

Very cool, but I wonder how well this thing handles (or is handled by) Expose, Spaces, etc.

I'd be up for this as most of my time is spent in web-browser land on my mac.
posted by Sam.Burdick at 5:23 PM on October 27, 2008

Yay! Something to check out on the mac. 3 FPPs today about PC crap.

But just what I need. Another browser to check my sites against.
posted by cjorgensen at 5:26 PM on October 27, 2008

Yay! Something to check out on the mac. 3 FPPs today about PC crap.

Let's not, ok?
posted by Artw at 5:29 PM on October 27, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I drink your WebKit!
posted by lostburner at 5:31 PM on October 27, 2008 [6 favorites has favorites]

We Barbarians have traveled over half the internet to present to you this latest software offering. It’s something we’ve kicked around and found it useful for other digital professionals. We give a lot of presentations. A lot of speeches. A lot of Dog and Pony shows. And people want to see our work. The work we do is on the Internet. So... ladies and gentlemen if we say we’re an internet company you will agree.
posted by Smedleyman at 5:37 PM on October 27, 2008 [6 favorites has favorites]

In fairness, based on market share, we Mac users should have to put up with roughly 8.5 FPPs before we get one (and a half).
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:42 PM on October 27, 2008

This is beautiful. Thanks, krautland!
posted by *burp* at 5:44 PM on October 27, 2008

There is (was?) a tool that would do this for any mac app, or any Cocoa mac app supporting Services, or something like that. Ah yes, Mega Zoom.
posted by grobstein at 5:45 PM on October 27, 2008

Also, Glims for Safari + WebKit. Works great for me on nightlies, is one less (separate) app to install/learn.
posted by tmcw at 6:06 PM on October 27, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

So ... why doesn't Safari have this functionality already? Thanks for the Glims link, tmcw. I'll try it out. I hate the stupid Mac dock and its screen hogging ways.
posted by mrgrimm at 6:11 PM on October 27, 2008

I hate the stupid Mac dock and its screen hogging ways.

Cmd+Opt+D hides the dock (or Menu -> Dock -> Turn Hiding On)
posted by Frankieist at 6:20 PM on October 27, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

based on market share, we Mac users should have to put up with roughly 8.5 FPPs before we get one (and a half)

it would be inverse were you counting users who mattered.

grobstein: megazoom, which I love and use frequently, does something else. it merely expands windows, which doesn't get rid off the chrome shit. you want a blank screen around your stuff when presenting.
posted by krautland at 6:33 PM on October 27, 2008

Oops, sorry. I haven't used it for years, and the blog post I read suggested it could shave off the chrome.
posted by grobstein at 6:59 PM on October 27, 2008

This solves a problem I have been having. Thanks.
posted by jessamyn at 7:02 PM on October 27, 2008

If you would like to go fullscreen in Safari along with a host of other options, give Saft a shot.
posted by squorch at 7:04 PM on October 27, 2008

So what is the behavior in Macs that prevents you from doing an F11 type thing in Firefox? Not owning a Mac, that was my first reaction.
posted by selfnoise at 7:05 PM on October 27, 2008

Hey, this thing took my Safari cookies! What's the deal with that?
posted by Electrius at 7:21 PM on October 27, 2008

Hey, this thing took my Safari cookies! What's the deal with that?

All your webkit are belong to us.
posted by mandal at 7:30 PM on October 27, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Seems that you can do this in firefox too, presumably for all of win/lin/mac.

Though I just tried the built-in f11 and the automatic toolbar hiding (show on mouseover) works pretty nice too. You lose about 6 pixels at the top of the screen to the toolbar that way.
posted by jepler at 7:54 PM on October 27, 2008

About freaking time somebody made a browser fullscreen on a Mac. I was getting sick of people being all "If your mac is so awesome how come you can't just hit F11 and make the browser go fullscreen?" Why indeed.

Here's something awesome that my PC friends are jealous of :
Hold the control key and either mousewheel up/down, or use the two-finger scroll (if it's a laptop).

Screen zoom has saved my ass on many, many occasions. If you want to make sure lines are clean, hit command-option-\ (back-slash) and it'll toggle anti-aliasing.

Oh, and having system-wide spellcheck? Uber-sweet. Ditto for command-control-d for dictionary pop-up and right-clicking for spellcheck on a single highlighted word.
posted by revmitcz at 8:23 PM on October 27, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

Okay, I'm annoyed that this thing doesn't auto-add "http://" to URLs. It even throws an error that "http:/ is not valid" if you don't type in the protocol first. Curses.
posted by revmitcz at 8:33 PM on October 27, 2008

Hold the control key and either mousewheel up/down, or use the two-finger scroll (if it's a laptop).

Oh, my God... revmitcz, you just blew my mind! How did I not know about this?
posted by brundlefly at 8:36 PM on October 27, 2008

Very useful, thank you!
posted by clearlydemon at 9:02 PM on October 27, 2008

second! to brundlefly... it'll make reading the teeny tiny text here on the blue, which some of ya'll insist on using for comedic effect, that much easier.
posted by Sam.Burdick at 9:05 PM on October 27, 2008

All your webkit are belong to us.

ahh... always fresh! thanks mandal you just made my night....
posted by winston smith at 9:39 PM on October 27, 2008

Opera for Mac seems to do fullscreen with F11 just fine, FWIW.
posted by Jawn at 10:27 PM on October 27, 2008

So what is the behavior in Macs that prevents you from doing an F11 type thing in Firefox?

It's Firefox. Mozilla can't write a consistent version of Firefox to save their lives.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:33 PM on October 27, 2008

cjorgensen: But just what I need. Another browser to check my sites against.

It's based on webkit, same as safari, so no additional checking should be required. Unless fullscreen breaks your sites.
posted by ArkhanJG at 2:59 AM on October 28, 2008

Good old iCab got there first with Kiosk Mode (I'm pretty sure it did fullscreen browsing on OS 9).
posted by jack_mo at 4:17 AM on October 28, 2008

Here's something awesome that my PC friends are jealous of :
Hold the control key and either mousewheel up/down, or use the two-finger scroll (if it's a laptop).

Hm. Been doing that on my PC for a while now.
posted by sidereal at 4:30 AM on October 28, 2008

teeny tiny text here on the blue
You know you can change your MeFi text size in 'preferences,' right?
The link is down at the bottom of the page.
posted by bashos_frog at 4:35 AM on October 28, 2008

re: the zoom thing.

On windows it's CTRL+MouseWheel (or +/-)
posted by blue_beetle at 10:40 AM on October 28, 2008

That's in browser though, the mac thing is the whole screen.
posted by Artw at 10:45 AM on October 28, 2008

(Not utterly convinced the full screen zoom is that useful myself, but it's certainly a wow-y effect. )
posted by Artw at 10:46 AM on October 28, 2008

That's in browser though, the mac thing is the whole screen.

Sounds horrid -- the UI gets engorged as well?
posted by Ogre Lawless at 11:42 AM on October 28, 2008

It's a zoom of the entire screen, so yes, everything around teh edges disapears offscreen.

Like I say, interesting and showy but not to my taste. Still, it means apps that don't have a zoom sort-of have one anyway.
posted by Artw at 11:58 AM on October 28, 2008

You know you can change your MeFi text size in 'preferences,' right?

I think he was referring to text in small tags.

You know, that thing we do when we're being snarky or making a joke.
posted by explosion at 12:56 PM on October 28, 2008

It's a zoom of the entire screen, so yes, everything around teh edges disapears offscreen.

However, the field of view follows your cursor around once it's zoomed. I believe it's an accessibility feature for people with poor vision.
posted by brundlefly at 4:01 PM on October 28, 2008

Doesn't really seem like a great accessability solution to me. But for OH HAI I AM MADE WITH QUARTZ AND CAN DO THIS REAL EASY it's impressive.
posted by Artw at 4:28 PM on October 28, 2008

Like many programs on a typical GNU/Linux desktop, Firefox has a fullscreen mode bound to the F11 key by default. However, that also puts the location bar on autohide and disables the statusbar and menu bar, which is sometimes nice but not usually what I want. Luckily, Metacity (the default window manager in Ubuntu and other Gnome distros) has an option to remove its decorations from any window! To bind that option to Alt-F11, you can press Alt-F2 and paste this command (or find the option in Keyboard shortcuts under the Preferences menu):

gconftool-2 -t string -s /apps/metacity/window_keybindings/toggle_fullscreen '<Alt>F11'

Now, Firefox has a second fullscreen mode which retains the normal toolbars, and programs which lacked a fullscreen mode have one.
posted by finite at 5:25 PM on October 28, 2008

Finally got around to downloading the Plainview app. It's actually very nice - I may start using it as my primary browser. You can still Alt-Tab into other apps, or access the menubar by pointing at it, but the seamless takeover of the whole screen brings back fond memories of the ION window manager. Mmm...ions...
posted by odinsdream at 7:59 PM on October 28, 2008

Combine this with Eric Meyer's S5 and you've saved yourself the price of a license for Powerpoint/Keynote.
posted by [user was fined for this post] at 10:20 PM on October 28, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Cruz is another webkit browser with a fullscreen mode. And some other interesting features.
posted by edd at 2:40 AM on October 29, 2008

That's in browser though, the mac thing is the whole screen.

but...we were talking about...browsers... *head asplodes*
posted by sidereal at 4:48 AM on October 29, 2008

It is, as I say, very cool to do though. There's no clunkiness, everything still keeps running the same, you just sort of zoom in. I guess it's usefull if an app doesn't have any accessability options and you have to zoom in to see all the fiddly monochrome near identical icons that seem to be a mainstay of mac UI design.

(Apologies if I sound a little bitter. I'm doing some mac work at the moment, and the number of things that are Just Not Working or are A Pain in the Ass are easily waying the number of things that Just Work currently. And don't get me started on Objective C. I mean, seriously, WTF? I'd asusme that someone had come up with the syntax to be as randomly opaque as possible in an excercies in "thinking differently" If I didn't know it was based on some obscure historical artifact. WTF is wrong with having proper operators and using a . ? WTF is with all the square brackets @ signs and other junk? WTF Objective C? )
posted by Artw at 8:50 AM on October 29, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Whole-screen zooming is most useful for watching videos at full-screen. For example, ABC streams whole episodes online, but their player doesn't have a full-screen button. On my Mac, it doesn't matter.
posted by lostburner at 6:26 PM on October 29, 2008

Heh. I was just drinking free beer inm the offices of the people who built that thing not half an hour ago. The buggers claimkes that it does do fullscreen - i shall have to ask about that.
posted by Artw at 7:59 PM on October 29, 2008