I am a big productivity freak, and I keep looking for ways to enhance my workflow. One of the tricks that I have been following is to to use my 24-inch, Full HD monitor as a Quad HD monitor with the help of a little utility app for MacBook.
More screen real estate helps you open multiple windows so that you don’t have to suffer between them and waste time in energy looking for the right one.
I already have got a Chrome extension in place to automate my split-screen, and it works fairly well because I am inside my Google Chrome browser most of the time. And just one click on that extension icon in the the the bookmark bar of Google Chrome browser opens my split-screen workflow.
But when I have my MacBook connected to my 24-inch full HD monitor, which has got Quad HD resolution on it, and now there is more room for opening more Windows. Sadly the Chrome extension I use for my productivity doesn’t support Windows outside of the Google Chrome browser.
Fortunately, some apps solve this problem by allowing you to set up multi-window screens. The app I am talking about is Mosaic.
How does Mosaic work?
The app is pretty straightforward. You have to install it on your Mac computer, and once installed, it will show up as an icon, and time and battery information is displayed on the Mac.
Before that, the app requires some access to run smoothly. Make sure you give it the proper permissions it requires to run.
If the icon shows up there, it means that the music app runs in the background. If not, you will have to do it manually and select it to start running the app whenever you start your computer.
Once it is running, you have different options for how you want to implement the split screens. When you click and drag a Window, different options would appear on your screen.
This will be a bunch of quick selection options for you to choose from. Dragging on top of these options would result in making the current window you are dragging; choose that option.
The quick layout option (third from left in the image above) divides the screen into four columns into four rows. You can drag your window on top of it and select the number of rows and columns for the window to occupy on the screen. It is far easier and faster than manually resizing the app window as per your liking.
You can also use the split-screen option to have two Windows appear on the left and the right-hand side. Or you can also select the size of the window you want to have on your monitor screen.
Selecting Different Layouts in the Mosaic App
If you want to make some changes to how you want to use the Mosiac app, you can click on the Mosaic icon, which will give you a bunch of options.
There are two ways you can put your app Windows into the split-screen mode, drag and drop, and click and select.
You can enable or disable them individually, and you can also select the layout view and how you want to group the windows. I like the drag and drop method of selecting Windows and putting it in a predefined space.
These are the settings that I use – Under the drag and drop section,
- The layout view is Grid, as it shows all the options in one place in a small box.
- Selected three apps under groups, which eye is what I use most of the time.
- I have selected to show the Grid whenever I click and drag the window so that it’s easier and faster for me to select a predefined space.
You can make even more changes from the ‘Preferences’ area of the app.
For example, you can go to the ‘Layout’ section, and then select the predefined spaces are created new space, and name it. Then you can go to groups and select it in a predefined group or create your group so that it can appear there.
You can also assign it a keyboard shortcut so that you can use the keyboard shortcut to do it the next time you want to put a window in that space. It is a Pro feature that costs more than the standard version. More about this later in the article.
The above image is where I created a new layout and then selected the rows and columns for the new Layout and assigned a keyboard shortcut.
And below is the Chrome browser’s image taking up the new Layout using the assigned keyboards shortcut.
The Mosaic app is available to try. It offers a 7-day trial. You can buy the app with a one-time payment. The standard edition is available at £9.99, which lets you use the mosaic app on a single Mac computer with the Drag & Drop Feature and Multi-Monitor support.
There is a Pro Edition for £24.99, which lets you run the app on up to 5 Macs, and has all the features unlocked, which we talked about in this article.
