P: Support for native full-screen mode on macOS

@Boodlums _ They usually require screenshots to portray properly, so I'd ask you to look back a few pages when I (along with others) were posting about them. You leave the Desktop space and come back, and 1/4 of the window has tried very hard to escape into the void. You have to play cursor gymnastics to find the one tiny pixel Photoshop recognizes a window adjustment to get it to return. Another thing was if you used Photoshop's full screen mode, leaving the Desktop space and coming back later often caused the toolbars to try and re-render, but fail. I'd have to kill the full screen mode, re-apply all the toolbars, and full screen again. Got to a point where gave up on it altogether.

For everyone who doesn't prefer it, don't use it? I respect people have different opinions on this feature, that's why from the very start, we asked for the option. You can still absolutely opt out and continue to use Photoshop's built-in full screen mode. The hundreds of upvotes and likely large amounts of other silent users are going to be happy there's some uniformity in a feature Mac users have enjoyed for over a decade. This is a win no matter what.

Apple's application frame is nothing like Adobe's, and I'm not a fan. For Pages, as an example, there is no frame. Each docoument is in its own separate window. Web browsers are pretty much all tabbed. Photos has minimal editing, a frame makes sense there. Remember the original Mac OS had both unframed (MacWrite) and framed (Scrapbook and Control Panel) UIs, when they made sense. The document frame sucks in Photoshop while its tolerable in Lightroom, especially with dual displays.

Microsoft doesn't even use it everywhere in Windows. Word and Excel allow separate floating document windows.

Adobe's application frame is a problem for integration regarding other third-party Mac apps that depend on the Apple Accessibility API (AX) as well. This isn't a strictly a full-screen feature or Adobe-specific problem, but it's in a similar class of issue to how Electron apps and other wrappers all develop their own idiosyncratic UI quirks, which is maddening when you're flying between multiple apps throughout the day and rely on system-wide hotkeys to keep everything navigatable. 

For an example, at the moment Finbar is the only app I've used so far that can pick up all of Adobe's menu bar items quickly, through which invoking a single hotkey + typing command is much faster than 1) setting an individual hotkey per Menu Item, which you will find that you rapidly run out of convienient hotkeys 2) you're not going to remember less often used commands 3) clicking through the menu bar is a pain in aggregate. Hence, it's really nice when a Mac app can be automated or triggered using the native API. 

And needing to use the Application Frame kills it for me. IMHO the worst feature in Photoshop.

By @Lumigraphics 

That one’s interesting, because for many years now, the application frame has been the default, standard window style for both Windows and macOS, because you find it in Apple Photos, iMovie, Pages, Keynote, Safari, and modern third-party Mac applications that compete with Adobe. The problem is that Adobe has their own custom Adobe-style application frame code (also used in Illustrator and InDesign). It’s the lack of the standard Apple application frame that’s behind why Photoshop loses its document tabs in the new macOS full screen support; because in all apps that use document tabs in the standard Apple application frame (Pages, Keynote, Affinity Photo, Pixelmator Pro…), in full screen mode document tabs appear right there at the top of the screen like we expect them to.

“or we can sit in the old days forever and intentionally accept all the other problems that existed without native full screen.”

What are these other problems? I don't use full screen at all (apart from watching TV shows or movies), and have no idea what problems you are referring to. Please enlighten me?

Those sound great too!

Especially Finder tags, I make extensive use of Hazel for automatically tagging project files. 

I would much prefer support for share sheets and cloud services and Finder tags. I make heavy use of Spaces but never use full screen mode- I suspect that Windows switchers find that more useful. And needing to use the Application Frame kills it for me. IMHO the worst feature in Photoshop.

@Lumigraphics macOS full screen mode makes no difference to my Photoshop workflow either. But…I have supported this feature request for many reasons. For one thing, Photoshop claims to support macOS, and macOS full screen is now one of its core features that an application should support if it claims to be macOS compatible, because it is not just about this one feature.

Supporting macOS full screen mode is necessary for an app to also properly support other macOS features such as Split View and Spaces (there are related bugs), so until now Photoshop was broken for those features too. I know many Mac users who live in Split View (I use it on the iPad), and when Photoshop is not set to use macOS full screen, it cannot be added to Split View. Also,  if someone is using Apple Sidecar to make their iPad a second display for their Mac, an app that does not support macOS full screen cannot use the “Move to iPad” command.

Also, I support this because so many Photoshop users have requested it. This is one of the most highly requested features, and you can see that this single feature request thread is 15 pages long.

So, this doesn’t make much difference to me personally, but it helps complete Photoshop support for macOS, and it matters to a lot of Photoshop users so they should have it.

Now, about that other missing core macOS feature that many of us rely on in almost every other Mac & iOS app, the Share button… 🙂

This is the Adobe forum, it should go without saying that a lot of us make a living off of Adobe software.

Frankly this is an enormous improvement to my workflow sanity, so credit due where credit due, thank you to whoever at Adobe who helped implement the native frame. This was a priority for me!

Point, counterpoint. And yes obviously, none of us get what we want. This isn't the first time I've wondered about the development roadmap and priorities.