Comments on fullscreen

I like the idea of a fullscreen feature, but I’m not quite sure what the Observable team’s plans/goals are with it.

Right now it hides the ability to toggle code visibility, and hides the names of cells, similar to a view in a window narrower than ~1000 px (e.g. when browsing via phone). Is the goal for this to only be a kind of theater mode, not intended for editing?

[You might want to add a special case where the editor features to the left stay visible even in fullscreen when in “safe mode”; then someone with 2 computer displays (or a split-screen feature in their OS) could open two views of the notebook, each full screen on one display, one of the two in safe mode. Edit: on the other hand, maybe the browser/OS already has the ability to make a regular browser view fullscreen, and that’s unnecessary; in that case, might it make sense for the new fullscreen “theater” mode to be available even when the view is inside a window?]

Is there a way to detect fullscreen and change the view, other than just watching for a very wide width? It seems like in some cases someone might almost want a completely different notebook style for fullscreen viewing vs. in a standard window.

If I wanted to take full advantage of a desktop display I would probably put the body copy in columns and scroll horizontally (Tofu is IMO the best environment for reading long texts on a computer screen). Or maybe put body copy and diagrams/data side by side.

Someone else might want to make a single cell at a time take the whole screen, e.g. use the fullscreen view more like a slide presentation vs. a scroll.

The way that the current styling works, the body copy stays in a nice compact column, but the gray background on the code listings and the little object inspector when output of a cell is a javascript object make ridiculous long lines across the (generally otherwise blank) display.

The new fullscreen feature uses the Fullscreen API to make the content of your notebook fill the screen, rather than just the window, and is primarily intended for presentations. For example:

As you mention, most browsers already have a way to make a window fullscreen, such as ⌃⌘F for View > Enter Full Screen in macOS Chrome, which is nice for editing.

Is your goal to have someone able to flip through the slideshow slide by slide using the keyboard or similar? Right now it’s still just a big scrollview.

By scrolling.

(Here are a few additional characters to satisfy Discourse’s arbitrary character limit.)

For some reason, scrolling while fullscreen doesn’t seem to work in my desktop Firefox (61.0b4 on Ubuntu) and neither on my Firefox mobile on Android — Chrome does work, desktop + mobile.

(Something to do with scrolling iframes maybe?)

We’ll have a fix for non-WebKit browsers shortly. Sorry about that.

just a heads-up—wolfiex added key controls to the slide show below, it’s really nice!

1 Like

Neat! Though it doesn’t seem to work in my Safari. (Works in Firefox/Chrome.)

Also doesn’t make use of the native observable “fullscreen” menu action, and should work the same whether or not that feature existed.

I would like to use the Fullscreen mode to demonstrate and edit notebooks live. Unfortunately the ESC key is trapped by the browser to exist fullscreen mode, so I cannot use the keyboard navigation. This is annoying.
Any thought on adding another shortcut doing the same job as ESC?