Mac Photo: layers become de-selected. Why?

[VectorCat]

often this happens if I need to go to the finder or to another app. I come back, resume work, nothing happens. I look at layers and see that no layer is selected.

 

Feature or bug?  If feature, can a setting govern to give user a choice?

[R C-R]

There are several different ways to switch among apps on a Mac. Which one(s) do you use?

In particular, if you are clicking in an Affinity app's window to switch to it, where specifically in it are you clicking? So if for example, you click on an empty space on the canvas & the Move Tool is active, you would deselect the previously selected layer.

[lepr]

5 hours ago, R C-R said:

In particular, if you are clicking in an Affinity app's window to switch to it, where specifically in it are you clicking? So if for example, you click on an empty space on the canvas & the Move Tool is active, you would deselect the previously selected layer.

Once again our Macs behave differently, it would seem.

On mine, clicking on the Affinity document view to switch to the app is safe - the app will come to the front and the click will not be handled by the app.

Clicking anywhere else on the Affinity app interface to switch to the app will bring the app to the front and the click will be handled by the app, so that can cause a change of tool and/or change of object selection.

 

[R C-R]

33 minutes ago, anon2 said:

On mine, clicking on the Affinity document view to switch to the app is safe - the app will come to the front and the click will not be handled by the app.

Where specifically are you clicking when you say you are "clicking on the Affinity document view"? Also, which tool is enabled when you do that?

[lepr]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

Where specifically are you clicking when you say you are "clicking on the Affinity document view"? Also, which tool is enabled when you do that?

Anywhere inside the view of the document: on any object, on empty canvas or on the grey area surrounding the canvas.

The enabled tool is irrelevant, but it can be the Move Tool, for example. A click on the document view does nothing except bring the window to the front on my Mac, thankfully; as far as I know, that is standard behaviour for a Mac app. Your Mac frequently appears have a gremlin, though, doesn't it?

[R C-R]

8 minutes ago, anon2 said:

Anywhere inside the view of the document: on any object, on empty canvas or on the grey area surrounding the canvas.

The enabled tool is irrelevant, but it can be the Move Tool, for example. A click on the document view does nothing except bring the window to the front on my Mac, thankfully.

On my Mac, sometimes this works as you describe but other times, with the Move tool selected it is as if I had double-clicked on an empty area of the document (even though I am careful to single-click), which deselects the previously selected object.

I have yet to figure out what causes this. ☹️

At one point I thought it might have something to do with the driver software for my Kensington trackball, which after an update caused several issues that Kensington support could not resolve other than to suggest uninstalling it. But even after I did that & removed all traces of anything associated with it, this still happens intermittently. It has survived reinstalling the OS & the app, resetting it, & everything else I could think of.

[lepr]

29 minutes ago, R C-R said:

On my Mac, sometimes this works as you describe but other times, with the Move tool selected it is as if I had double-clicked on an empty area of the document (even though I am careful to single-click), which deselects the previously selected object.

It's especially weird if your mysterious double-click responses are happening only in the specific activity of clicking an Affinity document view to switch to the app from another app. Haven't you noticed peculiar double-click responses happening in other activities on the computer?

43 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I have yet to figure out what causes this. ☹️

At one point I thought it might have something to do with the driver software for my Kensington trackball, which after an update caused several issues that Kensington support could not resolve other than to suggest uninstalling it. But even after I did that & removed all traces of anything associated with it, this still happens intermittently. It has survived reinstalling the OS & the app, resetting it, & everything else I could think of.

Could be a mechanical or electrical problem. Have you tried opening the Kensington device and thoroughly cleaning and inspecting it?

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, anon2 said:

Haven't you noticed peculiar double-click responses happening in other activities on the computer?

There have been no odd responses to clicks that I have noticed. I have been getting odd responses to keyboard inputs on occasion, sometimes when typing replies in this forum in the Safari browser, as if some characters were being accepted in a different order than I typed them in, or my text replacements set in System Preferences > Keyboard > Text were being ignored, or correctly spelled words were underlined in red, as if they were misspelled, but nothing directly related to clicking.

2 hours ago, anon2 said:

Could be a mechanical or electrical problem. Have you tried opening the Kensington device and thoroughly cleaning and inspecting it?

I have done that twice. The first time was about 2 months ago, done because the scroll wheel was feeling scratchy. The second time was last week, done because a coffee spill engulfed the keyboard & trackball, fortunately while my Mac was not in use. Since I cannot open my Apple Extended keyboard, all I could do for it was to spray it thoroughly with warm water & wait several days to make sure it was completely dry before putting it back into service. While waiting for it to dry I used an older keyboard that has some wear related issues.

I suppose there could be some weird interaction between keyboard & trackball because both are wired USB devices & the trackball is plugged into one of the keyboard's USB ports, but that seems unlikely.

I also use a few System Preferences > Accessibility > Display settings, one to set the cursor size to about 15% larger than the default, & others to 'Differentiate without color' & 'Increase contrast.' There are a few known cosmetic-only Affinity issues associated with the latter two, but it seems even more unlikely that could be the source of this behavior.

Like a lot of other users have reported, for me the Affinity apps occasionally crash when doing something that does not usually cause a crash. I suppose it is possible this could leave the app in some odd state on the next launch or corrupt some user setting, maybe only if some other process is also running at that time, but there are too many possibilities to do much more than guess about that -- I often have Safari, BBEdit, & two or more Affinity apps running concurrently, usually but not always with one or more of the Affinity ones & BBEdIt hidden & without any open documents to make the best use of my iMacs 8 GB of RAM, & of course other processes like Notification Center, Spotlight, ContextService, & many others may be doing something in the background I have no direct control over.

After I uninstalled & deleted all traces of the KensingtonWorks software, my iMac is 'clean' in the sense that there are no third party add-ons that could conceivably affect any app or process -- the Mac menu bar includes only items that come from Apple; there are no Login items for my user account; no Launch Agents or Daemons that come from other than Apple sources; no StartupItems; etc. System Integrity Protection has never been disabled; Malware Bytes scans show no signs of malware; there is nothing I can find that suggests my iMac is not working as it should except for a few items related to the Affinity apps.

[lepr]

14 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I have been getting odd responses to keyboard inputs on occasion, sometimes when typing replies in this forum in the Safari browser, as if some characters were being accepted in a different order than I typed them in

Sounds more like a typo - a typographical error caused by the user striking the keys in the wrong order. We all suffer that occasionally - some people more than others - and overindulging in coffee or other stimulants tends to increase the occurrence. You must be pulling my leg. You can''t really think your Mac is juggling with the order in which you strike the keys. Are you being serious?

[Old Bruce]

42 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I have been getting odd responses to keyboard inputs on occasion, sometimes when typing replies in this forum in the Safari browser, as if some characters were being accepted in a different order than I typed them in

I am glad to hear that I am not the only one. I find that sometimes the text caret is bumped back by a character or two, rather like typing backwards. Only in the Safari browser do I notice it happening. As for typos, I am a Maestro.

[lepr]

1 minute ago, Old Bruce said:

I am glad to hear that I am not the only one. I find that sometimes the text caret is bumped back by a character or two, rather like typing backwards. Only in the Safari browser do I notice it happening. As for typos, I am a Maestro.

Are you another one who spilled rocket fuel coffee over the keyboard?

[R C-R]

Just now, anon2 said:

Are you being serious?

Yes, I am being serious. I am well aware of the possibility of making typos but I am also aware that keyboards can develop both mechanical and/or electrical issues that sometimes cause out-of-sequence keypress responses. This is particularly true of matrix keyboards like Apple used in its model A1243 keyboard, which is what I still use. I have two of them. The older one was taken out of service because it developed this issue (& that was confirmed by an Apple "Genius" when he tested it).

[R C-R]

12 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

I am glad to hear that I am not the only one. I find that sometimes the text caret is bumped back by a character or two, rather like typing backwards.

Do you use an Apple branded wired keyboard? If so, do you know its model number? (It should be printed in tiny grey type on the bottom of the keyboard case, usually near the bottom.)

16 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Only in the Safari browser do I notice it happening.

Same for me but I rarely use any other browser so it might happen with another one & I just never have noticed it.

[lepr]

40 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Yes, I am being serious. I am well aware of the possibility of making typos but I am also aware that keyboards can develop both mechanical and/or electrical issues that sometimes cause out-of-sequence keypress responses. This is particularly true of matrix keyboards like Apple used in its model A1243 keyboard, which is what I still use. I have two of them. The older one was taken out of service because it developed this issue (& that was confirmed by an Apple "Genius" when he tested it).

OK. Thanks for the info. I'd never have thunk it. Learn something new every day.