Back in 2008, I made a big step by switching my primary laptop from Linux to OS X. The feature that made the leap possible for me was Spaces, announced by Steve Jobs in Aug 2006.
Before Spaces, I was running Enlightenment on Gentoo in a 3-dimensional 3x3x3 grid to organize my desktops. It was essential to my workflow. I could move around my workspace seamlessly using only the keyboard for most actions. I was able to move as the speed of thought. It was wonderful.
Except for the hardware. It was crap. Everything was made of plastic. Every laptop I ever owned had the power connector fail at least once. Finding a way to fix it usually involved taking the fragile thing apart and soldering in a new connector. The results were sometimes disastrous.
And then there was the trackpad. Tiny and not capable of multitouch. I was so envious of my partner's ability to 2-finger scroll on her MacBook that I wrote a patch to emulate it on my non-multitouch trackpad.
Then came OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Between Spaces and the MagSafe power connector I finally had an option to move to a better supported OS/hardware combination with only a few compromises. I had to adjust from a 3D to a 2D grid, and I lost focus-follows-mouse-without-autoraise, but I could adjust, and adjust I did.
Things were great for a few years, but then Apple decided we no longer needed Spaces and fully removed it in OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) believing that Mission Control was soooo much better. They were wrong. Steve would have never list this happen.
Thank goodness, there was an alternative - TotalSpaces. In some ways it worked better than Spaces. I was happy, but Apple couldn't leave well enough alone. With each OS X release they crippled things more and more forcing the developer of TotalSpaces to use more and more hacky ways to make their product work. Their efforts were valiant and mostly effective, until Apple released macOS 12 (Monterey) and it broke things for good. I hung onto my Intel MacBook running macOS 11 (Ventura) for a long time, desperately clinging onto my Spaces functionality until I could no longer. But there was still hope.
Earlier this year I purchased an M4 MacBook Air to replace my aging Intel, and but before I made the purchase I needed to solve my Spaces problem. That's when I found Space Capsule. No, it wasn't exactly the same, but it created the grid I needed and let me keep the same keyboard shortcuts I was so familiar with.
Ryan Hanson, the developer of Space Capsule decided to only use documented APIs. Thank's to the Apple's stingy API, compromises had to be made. To setup my grid, I had to setup nine desktops using Mission Control and then cycle through them one at a time before Space Capsule would recognize them. It was an easy process, though I can see how it would be confusing for the technically challenged.
Then disaster happened. I accidentally did some combination of things that shut down Space Capsule while doing other things. When I reopened it, my desktops no longer made any sense. Apparently I hit a scenario where the app, thanks to Apple's limited API (have I mentioned that enough?), was unable to recover my previous configuration.
I panicked. This is an essential part of my workflow. I did all the things that made sense. Rebooted, destroyed and recreated spaces. Tried all sorts of finicky combinations of things to get back to my desired state with no success. I was afraid everything I was doing only made it worse. My one remaining hope was that I could contact Ryan who might have some secret sauce that would cure my ills.
And 30 minutes later he came through, writing:
To reset the app, hold the option key in the menu bar menu and select Advanced > Clear All Spaces.
Wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles, it worked! All was right with the world again. My heart once again started beating normally. Ryan also added:
I'm going to push out an update soon that will hopefully make the app so it can recover from this scenario on its own, or at the very least put "Clear All Spaces" in the settings window.
That's the way to support an app. 5 stars!
So now I'm on to my next adventure - removing a nest of yellowjackets from my crawl space. Ugh!
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