Just upgraded to Mavericks and Total Spaces 2…unfortunately the transitions (I like the cube) are so slow as to be useless. I’ve disabled Total Spaces because of it. Is there something wrong or something I can fix? There is a delay of more than 1/2 second until the space changes…doesn’t do this with just vanilla spaces on Mavericks, or if transition effects are not used with Total Spaces. Kind of a waste of $10 if I can’t use Total Spaces! Thanks.
Hi
Firstly, we’ll happily refund you if it’s not working well for you.
Secondly, the transitions work well on my test machines. The Slide transition will always be fastest, but the others are not laggy, so I am interested in in what hardware you have - and are you using multiple screens?
Thanks!
This is on a 13" MacBook Pro Retina, Late 2012 model, 8 GB RAM, i7 processor, using just the built-in display, no multi-monitors.
I’ve just upgraded my desktop iMac to Mavericks and noticed that it’s a little slower with TotalSpaces 2 as well, but nothing like the laptop. I do have a second monitor connected to the iMac. The laptop has a shared graphics system but the iMac (which is several years older) does, so could that be the problem?
Late 2012 is very recent hardware. I do not have the same machine to test against, but I wouldn’t have guessed it would be slow.
My Mid 2012 Mac Book Air (which is the most recent machine I have) works very fast - there isn’t any delay at all.
Can you by any chance try the Slide transition? There is considerably less graphics work involved in that one, so I’d be interested to know if it performs ok.
Well, even with TotalSpaces disabled completely and just using the built-in slide transition it is slower than it was before the upgrade to Mavericks. It used to be pretty much instant…now it feels like pulling taffy…just drags really slowly. The graphics on the late 2012 Pro Retina should be faster than a mid 2012 Air…I would think (though the Retina display has to push 4x as many pixels…). Maybe I’ll disable the retina display and see if that makes a difference (not that I would ever want to use it that way!)
The thing about the slide transition is that it’s using almost exactly the same code path as Apple’s Mission Control left and right slide transitions. So the performance should be the same as Apple’s own.
So a followup question, if you do not have TotalSpaces running, does the transition that happens when you click on an app that’s on another space work ok? Or does that seem sluggish?
Well, I’m not sure what just happened, but I once again quit TS and tried the built-in slide transition, and it behaved as before the upgrade to Mavericks. I then restarted TS to compare the slide transition and…it was back to normal! I had done this same thing of quitting TS and restarting at least a dozen times (including half of those restarting the MacBook completely) and every time it exhibited the lag behavior. This time was different for some reason! Go figure…well, I’ll give it some time and see if this is here to stay. Can’t understand why it suddenly repaired itself, though…I did nothing different or special!
That’s weird.
I wonder if it is something to do with the GPU memory usage or something like that. It would be interesting to see if Apple’s own code does it.
Oh, one thing I just noticed from what you’ve said - is it really that there is a delay before the space changes that’s the problem? I mean is the animation itself ok once it gets going?
Keep me posted.
It’s more like there was a delay until the transition took effect. There would be a hesitation, and then it would switch…and the delay was a half-second or more. Seems rather short when you think of a half-second, but when trying to pop back and forth between apps it was a real hindrance. It has continues to be good today. I still have no idea what changed. I didn’t even restart the system…it just decided to behave normally all of a sudden! There is a tiny bit more lag than before Mavericks and TS 2, but not enough to bother me at this point.
BTW, I’m really liking the new “fade” transition. While the cube is very neat, and one of my favorite effects, the fade is actually more practical as it makes switching spaces completely transparent and is very smooth.
Thanks- I like that one too. We had a fade in TS1, but it was apple’s very strange implementation that brightened as it faded. So it was nice to get it looking right.
Problem and solution:
On Oct 20 2014 I applied the Mavericks Security Update-005 2014 and upgraded TotalSpaces2, and afterwards, my screen transitions across desktops became very slow. I tried changing many settings, and changing the settings in TotalSpaces2 had no effect (changing to a “cube” transition did not actually apply a “cube” transition).
After a lot of playing, I have concluded that somehow Mission Control took over my screen transitions from TotalSpaces. I went into the Keyboard settings and disabled the Mission Control keyboard settings (which were identical to TotalSpaces2 keyboard settings in the TotalSpaces2 preferences box), and now I have my usual fast transitions back (and the settings in TotalSpaces2 are actually controlling how the transition is made).
I don’t know if TotalSpaces2 previously overrode my Keyboard preferences, if the Security update applied new Keyboard settings, or what, but it was distracting for a couple of days (and now fixed for me).
Best
Steve
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Ah, thanks for this. It may indeed be that apple changed the priority of the hotkeys.