Why Spaces is broken

Since seeing this post by Michael Tsai linking to a couple of articles on "Why Spaces is broken" I’ve been wracking my brains trying to remember where the heck I wrote about this, seeing as I was quite sure I had already written about it about two weeks ago.

Finally found it, in a comment on Sho Fukamachi’s weblog:

Although I really like Spaces I haven’t yet internalized it in my workflow. In my initial experiments with it I quickly realized that I had to think in an app-centric way rather than a task-specific way. Basically, you need to keep all windows belonging to a particular app in the same space or your application switcher behaviour will be at best counter-intuitive and at worst a nuisance.

And that means that I’ve yet to find a real use for Spaces because my work pattern tends to be task or project-oriented rather than app oriented (eg. a Terminal window showing the source folder of a particular project, the accompanying Xcode windows, perhaps a Finder window showing the build folder etc). When you work this way Spaces doesn’t really help you because you can’t have one project per space. It seems suited only to completely unrelated tasks which use entirely different apps, and in my workflows there are all too few tasks that you can think of in total isolation like that.

Two weeks later of full-time Leopard use and I still haven’t found a use for spaces.