Leopard, .Mac and Spaces Bug Apps are hidden

[macuser77]

This post is from my blog at maconmug.com, someone hear may run into this issue:

Yesterday I began running into a problem with being able to read mail on my laptop. I woke it from sleep, and opened Mail. I checked everything, minimized the window, then went about my business elsewhere. A short time later, I heard the usual chime alerting me that an electronic correspondence has arrived in my inbox.

I clicked on the Mail icon. Nothing. No fancy genie effect, no inbox, however the Mail menus in the finder appeared as normal. I couldn’t get anything to work with it, however I heard another chime come in. and the icon indicated the program was active. Even after I force quit Mail, it still would not appear. I rebooted my computer. Mail opened, appeared in the window, and I figured everything was running back to normal.

Alas, my misfortune returned this morning. I stepped into my office to further research the matter, when I noticed the same thing happening on my Mac Mini that happened on my laptop. I sat befuddled for a moment when I realized that I did make a change on one of my machines yesterday, in particular the Mini.

One of the great things about the .mac service is the ability to sync address book info, Mail accounts, Safari bookmarks, iCal calendars, etc. across multiple machines. Anyone who uses more than one Mac (and of course, is the administrator of both machines) would enjoy the benefits of a .Mac subscription (or an alternative service, but we’ll save that discussion for later). For some reason, when I upgraded my Mini to Leopard back in October, I didn’t turn syncing on.

Although I knew it wasn’t syncing, I just left it alone, until I finally really needed a setting yesterday morning. I turned iSync on, told it to sync up everything and I went about my merry business when the bookmarks I needed magically appeared in the Bookmarks bar after a screen refresh a few minutes later.

When I set up the sync, I just turned everything on, and didn’t think twice about syncing Spaces. I’ll backtrack for a moment again and say, yes, I once set up Spaces on my mini, which worked fine as long as I wasn’t doing anything other than iChat and listening to iTunes. It didn’t take me long to switch it off, however I didn’t clear the settings, one of which was putting Mail in its own separate window.

After my moment of enlightenment a short while ago, I reset my Spaces settings, then immediately, everything returned to normal. My world has retuned to normal for the time being.

So remember, next time your computer starts going on the fritz, the problem could quite possibly sit between your chair and the keyboard.