osx spaces with disappearing windows
January 3rd, 2008
This could alternatively be titled missing spaces. Anyway like many other leopard users, I've run into a little snag with spaces. 
It seems that it likes to loose random windows, anything from Terminal or Vim to VMware. Not cool. It's not killer, just annoying. I say that because I can still interact with the windows to an extent. I can usually save and close what I'm working on. Restarting the application "fixes" the problem. Hiding and Unhiding the window does not, nor do the missing windows appear in Expose. In the case of VMware I've found that switching the vm to fullscreen allows me to pause it properly and not loose any data. Good luck to anyone else who run's into this. Hopefully enough people have filed bugs, and we'll see a fix in the next maintenance release.
January 14th, 2008 at 07:39 PM Glad to hear I am not the only one seeing this... I am a recent switcher to the Mac from a PC, and I thought I was doing something wrong. I have usually been able to save my work but not all the time, which makes this a bigger issue than just an inconvenience...
January 14th, 2008 at 08:11 PM Bill, I've found that you can recover your windows by toggling spaces off then on again. I agree it is a serious issue, I can see people getting very angry at losing data. Good luck.
January 20th, 2008 at 12:12 PM You are unfortunately not alone. :( I have no workaround yet, though I'm going to try to turn off/on spaces next time this occurs to me and perhaps makeing in automater script out of it.
January 25th, 2008 at 11:19 PM Turning spaces off and then on puts all your apps on the same desktop -- No me gusta! An even better way is to load the spaces preferences and then ADD the app that disappeared to the application list. Move it between 2 different desktops -- Blamo! There it is!
January 28th, 2008 at 02:23 PM Thanks Marshall, I'll give that a shot next time things disappear.
January 29th, 2008 at 09:41 AM This is just unacceptable. I've never had any issues with losing windows in GNU/Linux (GNOME and WindowMaker to be exact). And one day I'm just switching between desktops and bam, some of my windows are just gone. Like the posts describe above, the program is still alive and well, its just not being rendered. Why can't apple get this right? They could have just used X to handle their window management instead of the pile of poo that they are using now. In fact, their entire OS feels sluggish thanks to the fact that their kernel has NO THREAD PRIORITY. Come on apple, why did they have to retrofit BSD and not pick a much more community supported OS like GNU/Linux. Then Apple could soli focus on what they do best, the graphical interface.
February 5th, 2008 at 11:58 AM go to spaces, turn it back on, and delete all the programs in the list with the minus sign at the bottom. although my spaces was clicked off, somehow leopard was still putting my apps into other windows, that I could not access. I had trouble with iTunes and iPhoto (the ones I had tried briefly in space 2, before turning off spaces).
February 6th, 2008 at 04:05 PM Thank you for this post Mark. Maybe this is gonna help some people sometimes. Has anybody seen a sustainable fix for this issue? (Mark if you hear anything regarding this, would you send me a mail?) Thanks!