05-30-2011, 05:46 PM

Hi
I've been using macs off and on since os7 and pc's daily since dos 3! This year I decided to finally make the switch to a mac for my main computer at home although I still have to use pc at work and on laptops etc.

All has gone very well and I am even starting to warm to itunes which is quite a shift from winamp.

So tonight I fired up my G5 with OSX 10.5.8 and started playing some tunes, then I started safari to d a spot of browsing and itunes disappeared! The music kept playing but the application got hidden somehow.

I now find that whenever I open a new application my desktop is cleared of everything else except the application in focus!

I can make them all come back by going to the finder menu and selecting "show all" but this is not how it worked yesterday and I cant work out what I have done!

I have looked everywhere for a setting that may have changed causing this problem but I cant find one.

Any help would be gratefully received!

05-31-2011, 05:18 AM

You have "hide others" invoked. This hides everything except the current in-use app. This probably occurred by you pressing option-command-H when you meant to press command-H.

Pressing it again will undo what you did.

05-31-2011, 07:04 AM

Tried the key combination as suggested but it made no difference. Also tried another keyboard but still no change!
If it was classic os I would delete the keyboard prefs but I cant find them on osx!

06-01-2011, 07:19 PM

oK
Everyone who reads this post is going to think I am totally mad but I don't care!

This problem was driving me mad and I had just about given up sorting it and was preparing to reinstall the os and start over.

Just out of curiosity I logged out and logged in on my wife's account after playing around as her for a bit (I didn't put any of her clothes on or anything) I discovered that everything worked as expected.

If i opened photoshop and then safari photoshop remained on the desktop behind safari just as it should. In fact I went mad and filled my three displays up with applications, system pref's, all sorts of stuff and nothing was hidden.

Great I thought so now all I have to do is work out what has changed on my account.

I logged out and then back in as me expecting to spend the rest of the evening trying to track down the problem. Guess what - once I had logged back in everything now works as it should!

I guess I should have tried this earlier but just didn't think of it. Now I don't profess to being an IT expert but I have worked with computers since my school days and spent ten years as a digital printing specialist at a very famous imaging company. I made the basic mistake of thinking I had seen it all - serves me right!

All theories of what the **** happened would be most interesting but in the mean time i am just pleased to be able to see itunes on one monitor with files and stuff in finder on the second while I type this in on the third - bliss is restored (until the next problem) ----- Ohhh computers!