How do I fake 2 discrete monitors using a DualHead2Go?

Question

I just got a Matrox Dualhead2Go for use with my MacBook Pro. I realise that the reason it works is that it fakes 1 big (wide) monitor. I also kind of depended on the software that came with it to trick OSX into accepting it as 2 monitors.

Turns out the support is kind of lame: it just adds shortcuts for maximizing the window to whatever screen you want. And it even gets that wrong, since my dock doesn't auto-hide, but it doesn't take it in account while resizing, causing my window do end up "behind" my dock. (I've made a AppleScript that does the resize correctly, that I'll post below).

There's two glaring issues this causes: Full screen (video, etc.) takes up both monitors, and dialogs just pops up in the middle.

Is there a way to trick OSX, or at least a way to fix these issues?

Answer 1

The following AppleScript does a "correct" resize, provided your dock is 50px wide and your resolution is 1680*1050.

set _app to GetCurrentApp()

tell application _app
    set bounds of window 1 to {50, 1, 1680, 1050}
end tell

on GetCurrentApp()
    tell application "System Events"
        set _app to item 1 of (every process whose frontmost is true)
        return name of _app
    end tell
end GetCurrentApp

Tip: Create a new service using Automator, and paste the code in the workflow (there's a "Run actionscript" workflow thingy). This will allow you to assign a shortcut key to the resize action.