Q: Auto hiding apps in mountain lion and now mavericks

simonwoof wrote:

 

but these are in my menubar

 

is it possible that there are other plist's?

I wonder, what was in your Login Items?

As far as I can tell (and it is very difficult to tell from your descriptions) you are describing normal operating system behaviour. It is possible that one or more of your Login Items was consuming all of your memory and causing the OS to quit other applications to make room.

While you are no longer launching the offending application(s) at startup, it is still on your machine. If you were launching it at startup, it may be something that you want to run on a regular basis. If so, you are likely to continue to experience this problem the next time you run whatever was causing the problem to begin with.

I suggest you copy that file back to where you found it and/or restore it from backup. Then, run a a little diagnostic program I wrote to help show what might be causing these problems. Download EtreCheck from http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck, run it, and paste the results here.

Hopefully it will list all of your Login Items and that might help to show what the problem is. It will also list all of the various background processes that are installing all of those menu items.

I suspect that you were launching pretty much every major application you have from your Login Items. That would exhaust your memory and put the OS into memory saving mode where it would start quitting applications on you.

Disclaimer: Although EtreCheck is free, there are other links on my site that could give me some form of compensation, financial or otherwise.

simonwoof...Do you have any idea how you got rid of this problem? I'm experiencing the same thing and it started right after I installed and uninstalled Obsidian Menu Bar. Immediately after uninstalling, any application on my screen that is not the front most app auto hides. So if I'm typing an email, all my other apps hide by themselves. They are still open, just hidden. If I'm in Google Chrome, Mail and everything else will auto hide. I've done my research but have not gotten any answers.

Thank you simonwoof,

I rebooted in safe mode and it seems to have cleared itself up. I'm not sure how or why but am happy that behavior is gone and that it didn't take 18 months! Thanks for your reply...

Second post fixed it for me thanks Linc

I realize it's been nearly a year, but I ran across this discussion and immediately noticed something that apparently no one else did -- and it might prove helpful to future readers:

The OP stated the problem:

"apps started to auto-hide after not being front…after about 30 secs"

"this is very annoying and i cant seem to find any way to stop it"

Later, he posted screenshots of his start-up apps, one of which was Spirited Away, which I've used, myself. Here's the description of Spirited Away from MacUpdate:

Spirited Away checks each running application's activity, and if an application isn't active for a certain fixed time, Spirited Away hides the application automatically.

(One specifies, via preferences, the number of seconds that should elapse before background apps are hidden.)

So, the "problem" described here was in fact the primary feature of a 3rd-party app that the someone installed on that Mac — and presumably forgot about. 

Yes, I noticed the presence of Spirited Away right off the bat too.  Not sure how the excellent diagnostician Mr. Davis missed this, but not even the best of us can know the function of every login item.  As further proof of this, I just learned about Spirited Away only a couple weeks ago.  Unfortunately, Spirited Away was discontinued (in other words, spirited away itself).