Activating Alfred when Photoshop is active hides Photoshop

[twberger]

Steps to reproduce:

 

1. Launch Adobe Photoshop CS6 and focus its window

2. Activate Alfred (hit the assigned keyboard shortcut)

 

Expected behavior: the Alfred popup is drawn on top of the Photoshop window

Actual behavior: Photoshop's window disappears, revealing whatever was beneath it, and the Alfred popup is drawn on top of that. When Alfred is closed, the Photoshop window reappears.

 

OS X: 10.9.5

Alfred: 2.4 (279)

 

This happens 100% of the time, across many reboots and even multiple versions of Alfred, Photoshop, and OS X. I haven't seen it with any application but Photoshop.

 

Speculating now, but I suspect Photoshop is using some alternative windowing mechanism that is interacting poorly. I've noticed that Photoshop also breaks tools that resize windows, like Cinch and Spectacle.

[Andrew]

Steps to reproduce:

 

1. Launch Adobe Photoshop CS6 and focus its window

2. Activate Alfred (hit the assigned keyboard shortcut)

 

Expected behavior: the Alfred popup is drawn on top of the Photoshop window

Actual behavior: Photoshop's window disappears, revealing whatever was beneath it, and the Alfred popup is drawn on top of that. When Alfred is closed, the Photoshop window reappears.

 

OS X: 10.9.5

Alfred: 2.4 (279)

 

This happens 100% of the time, across many reboots and even multiple versions of Alfred, Photoshop, and OS X. I haven't seen it with any application but Photoshop.

 

Speculating now, but I suspect Photoshop is using some alternative windowing mechanism that is interacting poorly. I've noticed that Photoshop also breaks tools that resize windows, like Cinch and Spectacle.

 

This isn't going to be a bug in Alfred, and as I haven't heard others report this, it could be something installed on your user profile which is causing the issue.

 

Have you tried creating a new user account on your Mac, switching to that user and seeing the behaviour there?

 

[moving to help sub-forum]

[Kikker]

I am having exactly the same problem with 2.4 (279)

[jboehler]

I have the same behaviour on my OS X 10.9

 

[Andrew]

This is very odd indeed, I wonder what Photoshop is doing to cause this. If it's also breaking things like Cinch and Spectacle, has anybody dared to broach the subject with Adobe?

[twberger]

This is very odd indeed, I wonder what Photoshop is doing to cause this. If it's also breaking things like Cinch and Spectacle, has anybody dared to broach the subject with Adobe?

 

Sorry for the late reply, I was an idiot and assumed I got auto-subscribed to this topic.

 

I haven't, but I will. It definitely does seem like Adobe is the one doing something odd, but I posted here because a) I'm almost certain Adobe won't be as responsive as you, and being able to deal with odd software could only make Alfred better. Even if Adobe fixes it, whatever they were/are doing that causes the problem could still be done by somebody else.

 

I haven't installed it, but supposedly there is one window manager that does work with Photoshop, slate. Maybe there's a hint as to why in its code - it's open-source.

 

Another hint may be that Photoshop seems to treat its tabs as windows, and the over-arching window as not a window - Cmd-w closes tabs, but won't close the window. Also, I read that older versions of photoshop didn't even have a main menu, that the tools were all in floating toolbars. Maybe the main window still uses some sort of mode intended for floating toolbars?

Edited October 7, 2014 by twberger