Some perceptive people have been praising Apple for a new option in the Spaces Preference Pane that substantially alters the way you can manipulate applications and focus. What essentially happens now — if you uncheck the new option in the pane with the verbose name When switching to an application, switch to a space with open windows for the application — is that if you are on a Space that does not have, for example, an open Safari window, focusing on Safari in that Space will not throw you to the next available Safari window, but stay in that Space. This is awesome, except it doesn’t seem to work with iChat.
For example:
- On Space 1, launch iChat. Open your buddy list, and open a chat window.
- Move the chat window to Space 2, and move to Space 2.
- Click on iChat in your dock, or Command-Tab to it.
- For me, this brings me back to the iChat buddy list.
In retrospect, this may be the fault of Chax, a set of extensions I use in iChat. But I don’t feel like uninstalling it to find out. Anyone else want to try?
2 Comments
I don’t use spaces, so I can’t test this, but does it fix mail’s bug? I hate when I write a new mail and switch windows to look something up, then click on mail.app, at first it shows up with the new mail on top, but then brings the main window (not the new mail) to the front. Very annoying.
I’ll have to try when I’m at home, but if an application is active then clicking on its dock icon will cycle to the next space in which it has windows. Are you sure you aren’t being caught out by that?