SPACES Balls

why do you have to turn spaces off?

Just work in "space 1"

I leave spaces on and use 1 space 95% of the time, but sometimes i use a specific program in space 2. haven't run into any problems.

Hi I do much the same. On my laptop at work I keep itunes open in space 2 and do pretty much everything else in space 1. I have never had it do anything weird to me. It might be worth backing up with Time machine and then doing a clean install from the Leopard disk. At the end of the install it will give you the option to restore from the time machine back up. I did this to fix a different issue I had with iPhoto after upgrading to Leopard and it worked a treat.

If you look at all the Spaces threads, you’ll see people are having numerous problems with Spaces with many different apps. I think one reason is people are assigning different apps to Spaces and then Spaces is quirky about automatically changing from Space 1 to Space 2, etc. I noticed that especially if I moved the cursor near the edge of a window, e.g., MS Word, my document would disappear and I could not get it back although all the menus were still showing in Word and selecting the document from the File menu or trying to Open or anything else. And this was with Spaces DISABLED. Many people are looking at the apps for problems, but I’m pretty sure it’s an unexpected behavior in Spaces. We haven’t gotten used to using it yet. By removing all the apps from all the Spaces and disabling Spaces, the problems of disappearing windows is gone. The reason for so many apps being involved is people are assigning different programs to the Spaces. Or maybe it takes some time using this new feature for us to understand how to change from Space to Space, cntrl-3, or cntrl-left-arrow. But Spaces working when it has definitely been disabled is a problem with the software.

I do see a bunch of Spaces threads with problems, and posted on a few of them today
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1223478
is one of them

bruce, your idea that assigning specific programs to specific spaces is a problem is very interesting. of course, Apple PROVIDED this functionality... but i MAY test it to see if that is a problem. I have itunes go to space 3 and safari to space 2 automatically in the preferences. I then use space 1 for my email. I also have World of Warcraft going to space 2 automatically if i run it. I've run into problems twice now with this setup. Perhaps defaulting programs to specific spaces is the culprit. I'll play with it.

I wonder who else has similar problems and how they deal with it, other than turning spaces off.

I wrote that message a long time ago.

Since updating to 10.5.2 I have had very few problems with Spaces and I really like using it. I keep a calendar, e-mail, and Stickies in one space, iChat and Safari in another, and other separate Spaces for Excel, Firefox (running streaming audio), and one for Word.

I think it will take some experience to get used to this new feature, but so far, it works very well for me.

When I was first having problems with Spaces in 10.5.1, I disabled Spaces entirely (removing them from the System Preferences Spaces window) and was amazed how cluttered the screen was with all the applications open. It’s great to have Spaces working again, although, as you pointed out, some users are still having difficulty with it.

I hope Apple doesn’t do away with Spaces, like they did when they made it so only one of several windows came to focus (to the top layer) since 10.3. But now with Spaces, that isn’t a problem because most of my Spaces have only one application running.