You may have heard some of the cool kids discussing Spaces and wondered “what’s that all about?”.  Or not.  Many Mac users don’t even know about this feature.  I came from years of using Linux systems where having multiple desktops was the norm.  Before Apple introduced Spaces I was using a third-party application to provide that feature-set.  (I have done the same thing on Windows as well.  You can read about that here.  Ubuntu, of course, still has it natively.)

Recently I encountered an oddity with Spaces which deserves a mention.

Normally with Spaces enabled you can simply Super-<up arrow> (command-<up arrow> or Apple-<up-arrow> or Windows-<up arrow>) to get to the Spaces control area (also known as Mission Control).  That was working fine.  However, once in this control area one ought to see a + in the upper-right corner by which one can spawn an additional space into Spaces.

I knew it had been there at one time, but at some point I noticed it was missing.  Not a big deal.  I could still create new spaces for full-screen applications; I just couldn’t create an empty desktop.  A minor annoyance.

In researching a mildly unrelated item I was reading this thread.  One user mentioned the bug whereby if your Dock is docked to the right-hand side of your screen (mine is) the + is MIA (mine was).  The the kicker reply came informing that commenter that with the Dock on the right the + was on the left.

It’s not exactly true.  You have to mouse over to the upper-left corner and the space and + fly-out from the left edge.

So that little mystery is solved.