Spaces bug?

[Mhaddy]

I am not sure if this is application centric or Spaces centric, but often when I am switching between Spaces, the application that I switch to will not be brought to the forefront. For example, if I am going from a Finder window in Space 1 to a Word document in Space 2, when I switch to the Word document, though it will be highlighted (as if it were active), an inactive window in the same Space as the Word document will be on top of the Word document. I know that sounds convoluted, and I am having trouble recreating the issue so that I can take a picture and show you. Hopefully that made some sense!

 

[HLdan]

I'm sure how often this happens for you but I just opened a few apps and placed them in different spaces and switched and the ones I switched to became the active window. However Spaces is known to be a bit buggy at times, for instance sometimes apps will jump to another space on their own when switching back and forth so you may not be alone on this issue.

 

[Mhaddy]

Ah hah! Managed to recreate the issue, here's a screenshot of what I'm experiencing:

Has anyone else been having this problem?

 

[scienide09]

I've had it before that my application in another space is not active when I switch to that space. This sometimes happens even when it is the only application running in that space.

I thought it was a bug, or else my inexperience with Spaces, since I only recently started using this feature.

 

[brandonzar]

Office 2008

I have had a similar problem when using powerpoint 2008 (I prefer keynote but was forced to use powerpoint by my professor). I have powerpoint set to stay in space 2 of a 2x3 grid, but everytime I would switch from my browser in space 1 to powerpoint it would take me to space 2 but powerpoint would move to space 1. It did this wether I used "command 2" or clicked on powerpoint in the dock. This has only ever happened with powerpoint so I wonder if this is just a office 2008 problem.

 

[zaney]

I don't think this is a bug with spaces, it's a known bug in Microsoft Word.
It'd been discussed in another thread, but I forget where. Basically, Office (and more specifically, Word) does NOT play nice with Spaces OR Exposé.

 

[Mhaddy]

Fortunately (unfortunately?) I think you're right, zaney. Doing a little digging on MS's Mac Office 2008 site and list of known issues and there it was, Spaces & expose issues. Oiy! Glad it's not MBA-related though.

 

[zaney]

Indeed, it seems Microsoft has even more trouble writing bug-free software for Macs than it does for PCs. They should probably just stop writing software all together, that way there can't be any bugs.
At least you know there's nothing wrong with your Mac though.

 

[Mhaddy]

Precisely. I'll be graduating in two weeks and then my requirement to use Office will cease to exist! As this isn't my work laptop, that now leaves me open to opportunities to try new word processing software like Pages or Open Office or [insert]. I'm already hooked on Keynote for presentations, and I hear Numbers is very nice for everyday spreadsheet usage, so I'm looking forward to making the switch.

 

[Brianstorm91]

I've got a problem with Adium - when the contact list is open and I switch to another space, pop-up boxes appear showing a contact's info if I hover over the right place, even though it's on another space.

 

[zaney]

Drifting a little off topic now, but OpenOffice is not yet available natively for OS X (It needs X11, I believe), but you can use NeoOffice, which is the OS X port. However, if you have iWork you might as well just stick with Pages, which is beautifully designed, and more than sufficient for general document editing/layouts, plus it reads office files anyway.

 

[Mhaddy]

Excellent, thanks for the advice zaney - I appreciate it!

 

[Brianstorm91]

If you're wondering about Neo Office/iWork that's precisely what I did; I used Neo Office for a month before I bought iWork.
While it's good and useable; it is quite slow and certain aspects could really use refinement, however I did have to try out iWork to make sure it was worth the £ and believe me, it is.
The templates are great, it's simple to use, looks great (I love the reflection on images à la coverflow), for the money it's a steal.
Something else which is really quite trivial is that the icons and page previews for Neo Office are really ugly; I went through and imported every Neo Office Document into Pages to get rid of that stupid boat

 

[AndyMoore]

Mail not the front application on switching to it

I'm having a similar issue issue but I don't have Office installed and never have.

OSX 10.6.4

My Mail.app and iCal are set to open on Space 1, my other apps are set to open on other spaces. If I'm on any Space other than 1 and want to switch to Mail.app, I click on it's icon in the Dock and the mac will switch to Space 1 but Mail.app will always be behind iCal, so I have to click it again to bring it to the front.

This happens even if Mail.app is the front window when I leave Space 1.

Maybe I shouldn't be switching this way but it's intuitive to me and I can't see any reason why it shouldn't work.

It's a niggle that's working its way up to annoying

 

[benmeroff]

One fix for the problem...

For those who figured out how to disable the spaces switching animation, it may be a contributing factor to the freezing bug - to reenable it, copy "defaults delete com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off && killall Dock" into terminal and press enter - the dock will disappear for a moment (don't worry), and when it comes back, the animation will be back. So far so good for me, I haven't had a single problem yet.