A short and sweet tip on How to Assign Apps to All Spaces in Mountain Lion (probably will work on Lion too). I was (and still are) a big fan of Spaces since it’s was first released in 2006 (you can watch a video of Steve introducing it here). I had this very nice and organized working workflow ever since:

  • Space 1: Creative Suite, Macromedia Freehand (just on my Snow Leopard station)
  • Space 2: Mail and iWork
  • Space 3: iTunes and iPhoto
  • Space 4: TextWrangler, Transmit and CSS Edit/Espresso.

But, throughout all the spaces, I would always have Finder, Twitterrific, Adium, Skype and Stattoo. This way if I changed spaces I could still have the same windows open from the Finder or my current chat with a client active without a glitch. I’m telling you, saves some time! Fast Forward to 2012. I upgrade my MacBook Pro, so it now runs not Lion but Mountain Lion. I get Mission Control:

Mission Control

I start working my way through the new system. Ok, it takes a bit to get used to. Not only Mission Control, but little things like iCal getting renamed to Calendar and Address Book to Contacts – but I work it… Except that when I’m switching from Space to Space I can’t take Adium, Skype, Stattoo or the Finder with me. Really a bummer really, I am used to do this for years and it does speed things up a bit. I try going to the System Preferences  panel to look for a little light but no luck. Where can I assign Apps to Spaces? I ask myself…

Mission Control System Prefs

Then, one night where I was working late I found it! It is now a but hidden… If you right click a Dock Icon with more than one “desktop” space available, you get a menu that has (at least) these items: Options, Show All Windows, Hide, Quit. If you click on Options, you can see that there’s an Assign To item. And there it is: All Desktops. Order is restored in the universe!

Tadah - Assing to All Desktops

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