Karl Katzke

If Apple had actually put a lot of thought into the Spaces feature on Leopard, a lot of things would be different. Spaces seems to have been ripped out of whatever the deveoper’s favorite Linux desktop manager was, and pasted down in OSX with a bare minimum of programming work.

First off, part of the concept with Spaces is that you shouldn’t have to reach for your mouse and close a bunch of stuff in order to see some completely different stuff on your screen. So why, when I want to open a new Firefox window in the Space I’m in does it always switch to the last active Firefox window’s space and open in in that space?

Second, why does it require me to, when I want to move a window from one space to another, hit F8 to open Spaces and then manually drag a window from one space to another? There should be an entry in the Window menu for an application to move the window to a different space, or a shortcut combo.

Third, why are the keyboard shortcuts for Spaces not shown in the Keyboard and Mouse Shortcuts preference pane?

Fourth, why when I’m using Firefox, I switch to a different Space (say, from 1 to 3), I click on an application (say, an iTerm window) in Space 3 to bring it to the front, and then flip back over to Space 1 … why is the iTerm window in Space 1 on top of Firefox? This behaviour does NOT happen when you’re working in a single Space … you click on the iTerm window and a separate iTerm window falls to the back of the stack, you click on firefox and do something in it, and you flip back to the first iTerm window … and the Firefox window is between the two iTerm windows.

Apple needed to keep Leopard in the oven for another six months or so. As it is, most of the new features are really half-baked. Has OSX become too big for Apple to manage? They’ve built an entire company on managing the details and delivering precisely the experience that users expect. With Leopard, they seem to be failing to meet user expectations.