{"id":23093,"date":"2018-10-15T15:05:37","date_gmt":"2018-10-15T19:05:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=23093"},"modified":"2018-10-15T15:05:37","modified_gmt":"2018-10-15T19:05:37","slug":"spaces-apples-mostly-ignored-macos-productivity-feature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2018\/10\/15\/spaces-apples-mostly-ignored-macos-productivity-feature\/","title":{"rendered":"Spaces, Apple&rsquo;s Mostly Ignored macOS Productivity Feature"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/appleinsider.com\/articles\/18\/10\/12\/how-to-use-spaces-apples-mostly-ignored-macos-mojave-productivity-feature\">William Gallagher<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/appleinsider.com\/articles\/18\/10\/12\/how-to-use-spaces-apples-mostly-ignored-macos-mojave-productivity-feature\">\n<p>If you use Spaces on your Mac then you probably love this feature so much that you can&rsquo;t imagine not having it. More likely, though, you&rsquo;ve vaguely heard of it and not looked to see whether it could be of use to you.<\/p>\n<p>Even Apple seems to have forgotten this feature as it received no updates at all for macOS Mojave &mdash;at least no visible ones &mdash;and unfortunately it has call to be updated. Right now certain elements feel oddly unfinished and others are downright confusing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p>Spaces has been around since <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mac_OS_X_Leopard\">macOS 10.5<\/a>, but it still feels unfinished. It never got full API support in Cocoa, so applications can&rsquo;t really control which spaces their windows appear on, and neither can scripts. The system decides where new windows will appear, and you have to live with it.<\/p>\n\n<p>The more complex a Spaces workflow you decide to use, the greater the chance that the system will mess it up, so it&rsquo;s best to keep things simple. In general, Spaces is better at grouping windows by application rather than by task, which is unfortunate because it&rsquo;s so natural to want to put separate tasks in separate spaces.<\/p>\n\n<p>A simple case where this falls down is with state restoration. I often have Safari windows spread across multiple spaces: windows related to customer support in the first space, windows related to development in the second space, and windows related to blogging in the third space. If I quit and relaunch Safari, it restores the windows but combines them all into the current space. As far as I can tell, this is not a Safari bug; it&rsquo;s just the way macOS&rsquo;s window restoration feature works. And because there&rsquo;s no Space API, it&rsquo;s not possible for third-party apps like BBEdit&mdash;which has always had fantastic state restoration in other respects&mdash;to do it properly themselves.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>William Gallagher: If you use Spaces on your Mac then you probably love this feature so much that you can&rsquo;t imagine not having it. More likely, though, you&rsquo;ve vaguely heard of it and not looked to see whether it could be of use to you. Even Apple seems to have forgotten this feature as it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2018-10-15T19:05:39Z","apple_news_api_id":"c3d4d3da-4c8b-4896-a4d8-4419b2dfc299","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2018-10-15T19:05:40Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/Aw9TT2kyLSJak2EQZst_CmQ","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[69,30,1609,1579],"class_list":["post-23093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-cocoa","tag-mac","tag-macos-10-14","tag-spaces"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23093"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23094,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23093\/revisions\/23094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}