Fans of OS X’s Dock will wonder if the same is true for the Big Shelf O’ Icons. So you can’t turn around without tripping over a menu bar in Mavericks. Before now, even if you used a second monitor on your Mac, the menu bar would remain on the primary display, necessitating a lot of mousing back and forth unless you installed a quirky add-on menu utility like SecondBar.
Separate menu bars for each display may seem obvious, but it will be a productivity booster for users of multiple displays. When you switch displays or click on the currently inactive menu bar, their transparency (or lack thereof) swaps. The currently active app’s menu bar looks like you’d expect it to look the inactive app’s menu bar is much less opaque. As I type this, I’m looking at a BBEdit menu bar on my laptop display and a Maps menu bar on an HDTV across the room. With Mavericks, though, each display can have its own menu bar. Up to now, the OS X menu bar was inviolate: There was only ever one menu bar. (If you’re running both an external display and an AirPlay display, you can also opt to have the same screen mirrored on all three of them, or have the AirPlay display mirror either display.)
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You can select an Apple TV from the menu, and choose to mirror your current display or extend the desktop. If you’re on a local network containing Apple TVs, an AirPlay icon shows up in the menu bar. Making the connection isn’t much different from how AirPlay Mirroring works in Mountain Lion. While Mountain Lion introduced AirPlay Mirroring-the ability to display the contents of your Mac’s screen on an HDTV connected via Apple TV-Mavericks lets you just treat that TV as a full-on second display.
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But if you’ve got a TV and an Apple TV, with Mavericks you can still have an external Mac display. Not everyone has the luxury of owning a display to pair with their laptop or iMac. If you really prefer the old arrangement, you can still choose to have spaces remain constant across your displays, thanks to an option in the Mission Control preference pane.
(Yes, Dashboard still exists! It’s gotten only a few new abilities, including a new sparkly effect when you add a new widget and the ability, for the first time, to move it from its leftmost space.) As I swipe from screen to screen on my laptop, the external display remains blissfully still, showing me all my other stuff. I can switch to a desktop view, another full-screen app, or even the Dashboard. When the Calendar app is displaying in full-screen mode on my laptop screen, I can move my cursor to that screen and swipe with three fingers to switch to other views. Each screen can have its own collection of full-screen apps and its own sets of desktops.