CrossOver Support - Community Forums

I seemed to encounter a wierd problem with one of my apps that remembers its last screen location the next time you run it. I am using Apple's "Spaces" to use 6 virtual desktops. When I moved the app running under CX games over to another virtual desktop and eventually quit. The next time I ran the app, it would not show up anywhere, not on the home screen nor any other of the virtual desktops. But eventually I found that it actually was present in the lower left corner of the home desktop but resized to so small as to not be able to read anything. I was able to move it and resize it and restore functionality. But I am just wondering if there is some bug in the way CX deals with OSX Spaces and virtual desktops?

You have to keep in mind that the concept of multiple desktops, like Apple's Spaces, or the same feature of Linux desktops, doesn't exist in Windows. Thus you're confronting your Windows app with something it doesn't know, so strange behavior isn't completely unexpected.

I don't know how MacOS implements the spaces. On Linux, the window manager seems to minimize all open apps on a desktop switch, and restores the ones on the new desktop. This works pretty well, except that some apps dislike being minimized in some situations. MacOS could do the same, but maybe it uses an oversized virtual screen. So if your screen is 100x100 pixels(just to have an easy value), then the Windows app could see that it is on position 300x200 if it isn't on desktop 1. It stores that position, and the next time it starts it tries to position itself at that position, but finds out that the screen is only 100x100 pixels big, and clamps itself to the corner pixel. This is just a theory 😊

I think CrossOver doesn't care about the spaces, as this should be entirely MacOS' business. If there's a problem with apps getting confused(apparently there is), then future CrossOver versions could take some countermeasures, like reporting a bigger screensize including all the available spaces. However, history has shown that every attempt to deal with such problems causes different new problems(e.g. a game trying to use a way too big resolution), so it has to be done with extreme care.

On OSX, apps are not moved from space to space when you switch. In fact OSX has an overview mode where you can see all of your screens at once and drag windows from one desktop to another to organize them however you want. The windows then stick to whichever desktop they were dragged too...including if you minimize them and reopen again, etc.. its actually a very cool feature, the best virtual desktop system I have ever used.

This is probably an issue with the way X11/Quartz and spaces interplay on OSX. Sometimes in the spaces overview window, the CX windows are invisible, sometimes not. But I when I can see them, I am able to move them to other desktops. But as I said, with this one particular windows app, once I dragged it to a new space, it worked fine there, but on the next restart it did not work so fine. So obviously, The X11/Spaces/CX/app were able to handle being moved around to different desktops just fine, but not on restart of the app since the windows app was storing something that didn't get translated through all that stuff to the correct "space". Well anyway, its a minor niggle. CX is still very cool. It would be nice if this worked though.