Henry Storyv:

The reason you have multiple spaces is to be able to clearly separate your work. So I could have one desktop for Mail and other communication related activities, one for programming, one for blogging, and one for other tasks such as giving a presentation.

(via John Gruber)

Henry outlines his use-case and the problems with Spaces and it. I’ve been following the same basic pattern and have been running into the same issues. It gets frustrating at times when you get thrown into another space for apparently no good reason. The Finder is my biggest headache. I’ll have a finder window open, switch back to Xcode, and then hit the Finder’s dock item to pull the window back to the front. Sometimes it works, but usually I get thrown into some other space that has a finder window open. I’m assuming it has something to do with the open order of the windows. It should give priority to open windows in your current space, if none are open, then fall back to the current behavior.

The other thing that I ran into last week that would be a nice change is space switching with an app in full screen mode. This might be a Keynote issue, but either way, it’s an Apple product. What I wanted to set up last week when I gave my CocoaHeads presentation was to keep the slides running full screen in one space, set up each of the demos in their own space, and then control-arrow to the correct one when the demo slide came up. Neither the control-arrow keys worked (they still switched slides) nor the show all spaces hot key. So I ended up having to drop out of full screen mode and then go to the correct space. Not a huge deal, but it would have been a little slicker to not show the ugly navigator screen in Keynote.