Spaces in 10.5.3: marginally less broken

Towards the bottom of the page, the release notes for the Mac OS X 10.5.3 Update mention some fixes to Spaces. John Gruber covered the changes at length last month, but since I was critical back in November last year, here's my brief take. From the release notes:
Resolves an issue in which switching to a different space and returning back to the original space may reorder the application windows with a different active window.
I can still reproduce that bug. I'm sitting here in the top-left of four spaces with a Safari window in front of a Yojimbo window. Ctrl-Down, Ctrl-Up... Yojimbo window in front of Safari window, Yojimbo window active. Short of making a screencast, you'll have to take my word for it. But the bug persists.
Resolves an issue in which activating an application from the Dock switches to a different space, even if there is a window for that application in the current space.
I can still partially reproduce that bug. I've got the Mail Activity window in one space, my main window in another, and a new message window in a third. If I head to the third space, make the new message window active, and hit the Mail icon in the dock, I am transported to the least useful of all spaces: the one with the Activity window. I don't see how that behaviour is helpful. Granted, if I make something else active in the third space, hitting the Mail icon in the Dock does just activate the new message window.
Fixes an issue in which Command-Tab may incorrectly switch to a new space.
As far as I can tell, this bug is fixed.
Addresses reliability issues with Spaces when syncing preferences over .Mac.
I don't know what this was about. I'm happy to assume it is fixed.

In brief, Spaces remains at least partially broken. I have yet to find it useful.

Comments

  1. I've found spaces useful for switching between virtual machines. :) It and vmware don't play together in unity mode.

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