The Ramblings of a Fool

Unique Photoshop feature: some tools can “toggle” uncontrollably.

After much frustration and hundreds of “throw away your preferences and restart the program moments” I finally found out what was going on with my Photoshop Phucking Phreaking out all the time.

Lemme back up and ’splain what the problem was. Ever since I switched to Leopard on my Macs, I’ve been pretty pleased (someday I’ll write that review I promised). I got used to the overly-subtle indicator under active applications in the dock… I’ve grown accustomed to the translucent menu bar (now something you can set since the most recent leopard update). I’ve even worked it into my workflow to use QuickLook to peruse images in a folder to see which one I really want to open. And yes, even the weird stacks thing has been accepted by me.

Leaving one BIG change to get used to… SPACES.

Using spaces requires a complete change in mindset when on your machine. Very daunting and quite the barrier to overcome, but I figured I’d better be a good lil’ Apple boy and give it a shot. Well… I loved it. Really, really loved it. It was like I had 6 (set your own number as you see fit) computers. Again, I loved it.

Until…

While using Photoshop one day (living happily in Space 4), I noticed that I couldn’t select anything. I had the marquee tool (or rectangular selection tool, or whatever) selected and when I went to draw a selection box, the move tool arrow showed up, then switched back into being the marquee, then the move tool, and back and forth and again. Non-stop. This rendered the marquee tool useless… also known as making Photoshop suck.

So naturally, I thought it an anomaly and restarted PS. Same problem came back. So I then threw away my Photoshop .plist file and all was well in the world. I used PS again and again with no problem for a few hours then BANG. Same crap.

All day, everyday I would use PS for a while and when the problem returned, I’d throw away the prefs and restart. Annoying when you’ve got bosses and clients breathing down your neck. They don’t even know what a marquee tool is let alone care that it doesn’t work.

So after much pain and sorrow, it finally dawned on me what was going on. Sometimes when I’d switch between my spaces, the problem would begin. I can’t remember now if it was only when I used my keyboard shortcut to “see all spaces” and then choose Space 4 or if it was using the shortcut keys I set for each of the spaces that caused it (maybe both), but basically… Spaces and Photoshop CS 3 have this bug. Adobe has released some updates and to my knowledge they didn’t address this… Apple too has released various updates since and as far as I know this is still unresolved.

Anyways… moral of the story is, I fell in love with Spaces, but it was a short lived love affair as it finally got to be problematic as it interfered with time spent with my real true love, Photoshop.

Oh well.

— TF