workspace disappeared

[ncJohn]

I had several images open (all floating) and had minimized the program. I do this all the time; I keep the program open with images that I come back to from time to time and work on. Just now I restored the program from the taskbar and the images were all there, and some panels, which I had undocked and scattered across several monitors, but the basic program (I guess you'd say) was gone. There were no top menus, no workspace, no tools, none of the panels that I had left docked. I had to close the program from Task Manager.

Does anyone know why this happened and what I might have done to get it back instead of using Task Manager to close it? I'm using ver 1.8.5.703 on Win 10 Pro 64-bit.

Thanks

[walt.farrell]

Perhaps you had pressed the Tab key, which is the default keyboard shortcut for View > Toggle UI. If so, pressing Tab again would have restored it.

[ncJohn]

It's an interesting idea, Walt, but I just tried it. It leaves the top menus and the black background intact. When I had the problem, that was all gone; my images and undocked panels were floating on the Windows desktop. But thanks.

 

[walt.farrell]

You're welcome. It was a long-shot

My next guess, as you have "several" monitors, is that the one with the elements you wanted to see was turned off or otherwise disconnected. But that will be even harder to confirm after the fact.

[ncJohn]

Nope, they're all always on; I use them all. (After having 3 monitors for over 5 years, I can't imagine getting along with "only" 2.🙂)

You know, I looked all over for the missing "parts." I hovered over the AP icon in the taskbar, thinking it might show up that way. I closed down the images one at a time, thinking that might cause everything to magically show. I made images full-screen and then minimized them. Nothing.

But again, a good guess.

 

[Dan C]

Hi @ncJohn,

Apologies for the delayed response here!

Could you please provide a screenshot of the layout you're seeing from your Affinity app?

Using the Windows Snipping Tool, you should be able to screenshot both monitors at once

[ncJohn]

Hi Dan, I'm not exactly sure what you're asking for, but I think this is it. I did this with Irfanview instead of the snip tool, just because I'm familiar with it. The Golden Sable poster is the desktop on the second monitor; I put the panels there just to unclutter the AP workspace.

So you can see that the two panels are floating on that monitor and the image of the face is floating inside the AP workspace. When the problem happened, all that remained of AP was the two panels and the floating image, except that instead of floating inside the AP workspace it was floating over the Windows desktop. (I didn't include the third monitor because it would make this image SO wide!)

So, in a nutshell, all of AP disappeared except what was floating.

[Dan C]

Thanks for that John, that's exactly what I was looking for

From your description, it sounds as though you may have clicked the 'Maximise' icon in the top right of the app, whilst it was already fullscreen. This will change the main apps window size to be a 'floating' window, the same as the document.

As the document is always drawn above the application, it's very likely that the app was simply hidden behind the floating document.

Another option is that after the app was 'maximised' it was accidentally moved off screen - as I've found in my testing that it's possible to 'lose' the app in this manner, as you can drag and drop it in a location that is no longer visible/accessible. I've shown this as best I can in the screen recording below - 

Does this look similar to the issue you experienced?

[ncJohn]

On 11/13/2020 at 6:00 AM, Dan C said:

Thanks for that John, that's exactly what I was looking for

From your description, it sounds as though you may have clicked the 'Maximise' icon in the top right of the app, whilst it was already fullscreen. This will change the main apps window size to be a 'floating' window, the same as the document.

As the document is always drawn above the application, it's very likely that the app was simply hidden behind the floating document.

Another option is that after the app was 'maximised' it was accidentally moved off screen - as I've found in my testing that it's possible to 'lose' the app in this manner, as you can drag and drop it in a location that is no longer visible/accessible. I've shown this as best I can in the screen recording below - 

Does this look similar to the issue you experienced?

I think neither one of these is what happened.

Your first scenario is not what I find when I maximize the app while it's already fullscreen. When I do that the main app window does change to floating, but it moves to the far left of my screen, taking up about 40% of the width of the screen, and I'm unable to change its size from that. The floating image stays where it was.

I don't think your second scenario is correct because it would have required me to, first, accidentally make the main app window smaller and floating, and, second, I would have had to then move it offscreen. It just seems like a lot to do accidentally.

But I find it very interesting that in your video the main app window does disappear behind your document window, just as you said, and that does not happen when I do that. This is what I get when I do that. (Just to clarify what my upload is, it's the main AP window, my floating document image, and the background is my browser with our discussion.) Do you think this difference between what happens on your screen and what happens on my screen could be due to a setting in Windows?

 

 

Edited November 14, 2020 by ncJohn
to add question about Windows

[ncJohn]

On 11/13/2020 at 6:00 AM, Dan C said:

Thanks for that John, that's exactly what I was looking for

From your description, it sounds as though you may have clicked the 'Maximise' icon in the top right of the app, whilst it was already fullscreen. This will change the main apps window size to be a 'floating' window, the same as the document.

As the document is always drawn above the application, it's very likely that the app was simply hidden behind the floating document.

Another option is that after the app was 'maximised' it was accidentally moved off screen - as I've found in my testing that it's possible to 'lose' the app in this manner, as you can drag and drop it in a location that is no longer visible/accessible. I've shown this as best I can in the screen recording below - 

Does this look similar to the issue you experienced?

I guess this is going to remain a head-scratcher, but I want to thank you for the time you took to make this video and try to figure it out.

[Dan C]

On 11/18/2020 at 6:31 PM, ncJohn said:

I guess this is going to remain a head-scratcher, but I want to thank you for the time you took to make this video and try to figure it out.

Apologies for the delayed response! I have been in talks with our QA team regarding this and we've been trying multiple forms of Windows Shortcuts and Affinity shortcuts to try and replicate this - but it's not something we've been able to do thus far.

We suspect that this is related to WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) which Affinity uses for it's UI and your multiple monitors. Currently Windows handling of WPF and multiple monitors (especially multiple monitors with different DPIs) can be buggy and not ideal.

As far as I understand, this is something our devs are investigating and we hope to move away from WPF in the future.

Please do let us know if you experience this again in the near future

[ncJohn]

Okay, well, thanks again to you and the QA team. I'll let you know if I see it again.