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fisherKing · Feb 4, 2008, 11:03 PM

i walked away from my powerbook, and when i came back...my mac was switching between spaces (i have six set up).
i'd click on safari, and the screen would switch to mail...then another screen, etc.
could not get screen 1 to stay on.

restart fixed it, but odd (and yeah, funny).

anyone else seen anything like this?

gradient · Feb 5, 2008, 12:44 AM

Not like that, but I recently had spaces stop working almost completely. I have all of my key apps dedicated to specific spaces but when I would switch to them, I would get the right menu bar but not actually switch to the right space or be able to see the app's open windows. I would have to manually open spaces and select the right space.

eggman · Feb 5, 2008, 03:34 AM

I find spaces to be both useful and frustrating by turns. I can't recount the number of times a dialog box would open in the "wrong" space for an app, hidden behind other windows... so that I have to play hide and seek to continue to use my app...

Some apps that put up a dialog box to announce that a task has completed can yank you away from another space that you're working in... just to show you that something you had backgrounded is done, and that can be disconcerting to say the least.

The heck of it is... even with dual monitors, spaces does answer a need. It's just not well integrated with apps (most of which antedate it, so... duh) and I wonder if it ever will be.

Judge_Fire · Feb 5, 2008, 04:56 AM

For me, spaces always opens (document) windows behind the currently active one, when doing a switch. Kinda annoying, but I haven't heard anyone else complain about it

Lots of little things to fix in the window management, it seems, but I have found having some apps attached to spesific spaces quite useful.

fisherKing · Feb 5, 2008, 10:08 AM

i've got my 'main' apps (ie safari, mail, indesign) each set to a seperate space, and works great.

just odd to see this happen...
but all working well again. and like the idea of workspaces a lot.

JKT · Feb 5, 2008, 10:45 AM

Originally Posted by Judge_Fire

For me, spaces always opens (document) windows behind the currently active one, when doing a switch. Kinda annoying, but I haven't heard anyone else complain about it

Lots of little things to fix in the window management, it seems, but I have found having some apps attached to spesific spaces quite useful.

Switching back to a space always causes the least important (and certainly not the last one I was using) window for an app to move to the front. It is very frustrating and has caused me to unintentionally close some windows because I had forgotten about this loss of focus issue. Also, if an app is set to open in all spaces (i.e. Activity Monitor in my case), I find that it is always brought to the front when switching spaces, in preference to the one you actually used last in that space.

Overall, the feature is very useful, but the annoying bugs it exhibits make it much less than a joy to actually use.

Personally, I would like to be able to rename the spaces as well, so that e.g. I could call my spaces e.g. "1 General", "2 Browsers", "3 Mail" , "4 OmniFocus, iSync and iCal", etc. so that it is easier to pick which space I need to go to in the menubar drop down list - this is quite useless otherwise:

Mac User #001 · Feb 5, 2008, 05:08 PM

Hmm. That is worthless. I used to use an app much like Spaces before it was out, and you could rename them. 10.5.2, lets hope?

Big Mac · Feb 5, 2008, 05:15 PM

Is that an Apple menulet or something from a third party? If it's from Apple then that's very funny that you cannot name the spaces.

0157988944 · Feb 5, 2008, 05:40 PM

Apple Menulet.

Big Mac · Feb 5, 2008, 07:43 PM

The slight levels of incompetence Apple demonstrates every so often never cease to amaze me.

JKT · Feb 6, 2008, 08:41 AM

Actually, a nice feature that Apple could add would be to auto-populate the name field in that menu with the apps you have assigned to each space, so that if and when you change the assignments the naming scheme automatically updates as well...

analogue SPRINKLES · Feb 7, 2008, 05:25 PM

This happens to me at least every day and is annoying as hell. The only solution I have found is to turn off spaces when the problem comes up or restart.

Geobunny · Feb 13, 2008, 07:16 PM

Originally Posted by eggman

I find spaces to be both useful and frustrating by turns. I can't recount the number of times a dialog box would open in the "wrong" space for an app, hidden behind other windows... so that I have to play hide and seek to continue to use my app...

Some apps that put up a dialog box to announce that a task has completed can yank you away from another space that you're working in... just to show you that something you had backgrounded is done, and that can be disconcerting to say the least.

I'm with you 100%. It's unbelievably frustrating when that happens, and as you say, very disconcerting. It completely interrupts your train of thought and really makes you stop and think for a second about what has just happened. "Spaces, WTF?!" is usually what gets blurted out. You then have to work out which space you were in before you were whisked away, just so you can get back on with your work again which you didn't want to be interrupted from, hence moving to a new space in the first place!

The heck of it is... even with dual monitors, spaces does answer a need. It's just not well integrated with apps (most of which antedate it, so... duh) and I wonder if it ever will be.

That's the bit I don't understand. The hooks have been in the underlying operating system for a number of years now and were exploited very well by various third parties and I never had any issues at all. Windows and dialogs always opened where you expected them to, and being whisked off automatically to another virtual desktop without the user's say-so probably hadn't even been considered by the developers as a useful feature. I really can't fathom how Apple have managed to break it so badly, not to mention breaking the virtual desktop paradigm which has been around for so long.

While I can turn Spaces off and use one of the older 3rd party apps to avoid the all-too-common unexpected space-warps, I lose the ability to move windows between virtual desktops (a fairly fundamental requirement) but I also lose the superb integration with exposé and the ability to do the F8 overview thing.

I really hope, now that Apple have ironed out a huge number of bugs in 10.5.2, that they've got time to fix Spaces because I love it. I do love Spaces but it's bl**dy infuriating to work with at times!

UpQuark · Feb 13, 2008, 07:59 PM

Remember, that appplications must also be 'Spaces" aware in order to take advantage of spaces. If they are not, then spaces will not operate correctly. THis is also true in Linux and multi desktop. (I hope it is fixed in KDE4.x) Anyway - Apple has dropped the ball a bit here, but the applications must also bear some of the responsibility.

Test with iWork vs OFFICE kinda thing.

Geobunny · Feb 14, 2008, 01:35 PM

Originally Posted by UpQuark

Remember, that appplications must also be 'Spaces" aware in order to take advantage of spaces. If they are not, then spaces will not operate correctly. THis is also true in Linux and multi desktop. (I hope it is fixed in KDE4.x) Anyway - Apple has dropped the ball a bit here, but the applications must also bear some of the responsibility.

Yeah, I'm not buying that line though. As I say, there were 3rd party solutions prior to 10.5 which worked fine and didn't require apps to be "spaces-aware". To me, it looks like Apple buggered something up and, instead of fixing it, are asking 3rd party developers to work around it.