Hide After Effects failing on Mac OS Ventura

[SteveKirby]

I've been seeing issues with Cmd-H ever since upgrading to Ventura, but unlike the Save As… dialog cursor bug, I haven't seen this one mentioned elsewhere. AE often fails to hide when I use Cmd-H. The UI focus shifts to the Finder, but the AE window remains visible. If I minimize AE, undocked panels remain visible and cause issues. Using the menu command After Effects > Hide After Effects seems to work more consistently than the keyboard shortcut, though that may be coincidence. The problem as a whole is intermittent, not constant, so it's hard to test and provide specific detailed descriptions.

[Rick Gerard]

I have been trying to reproduce the Hide bug (Ctrl + h) on my M2 Macbook Pro running 13.3.1. 

AE, and every other app I have tried hides as expected. The apps also are removed from the default F3 key, which previews all open and not hidden apps. I don't have or use Hot Corners except for the bottom right to Hot Note.  Maybe the bug has something to do with the way the System Settings are configured.

Alt + Tab to switch always brings AE and every other app back.

I don't know if this helps the bug team or not.

[jenkmeister]

Thanks @Rick Gerard  - the best repro I have is to have only AE open along with a Finder window. Bring AE to the front, alt-tab in the Finder window, click back to AE and then Press Cmd+H. That seems to do it about 50% of the time for me.

If I also right-click on the toolbar icon for AE and say Hide, it'll also do it about 50% of the time for me. AE has literally no code that will respond to the OS/toolbar icon (currently) when choosing that Hide. That's an OS level call to tell the app to hide and sometimes AE does it and sometimes the OS thinks it has hidden the app but it remains onscreen. That's the part I'm trying to figure out now - is there something in AE that's stopping the window from going away. 

[Rick Gerard]

I just checked with only AE and Finder. About 50% of the time, AE would hide. Having a finder Panel open seems to cause problems occasionally. 

I don't usually hide apps, but I do a lot of Alt/Option + Tab to switch between them. I've never noticed any performance gain by hiding, but maybe I have not been paying enough attention.

[Dietrich5C4F]

Still nothing 6 months later? is this an Apple issue or and Adobe issue. Seems 6 months is far too long to QA such a simple request?

[greg vannoy]

This thread may be nearing 6 months but this issue is well over a year old.

[jenkmeister]

As far as we can tell, it's an Apple OS change that is causing this. It occurs more frequently if the last other non-AE window you were in was an OS Finder window. We are working with Apple to understand what the issue is and if we can do something on the AE side to fix it. 

[jenkmeister]

@mdominic It's not Adobe's to fix. It's a bug in the Apple OS code. As I said above, we are working with Apple on what has changed. The bug is still in their macOS 14 beta as well. 

[robertd69306378]

Nonsense - if it was Apple's issue it would be happening in other software and it isn't. After Effects has always had issues with hiding/showing and this is just a more broken example. 

[greg vannoy]

Amen. I'm not buying the excuses. This has been going on for MUCH longer than the current iteration of Apple's system software.

[jenkmeister]

I'm the one who has been debugging this with Apple. There is no code in AE that is blocking the Hide that I can identify. AE doesn't even know about the Hide command taking place. It's all done at the OS level. If there was an AE-side fix, I promise you I would have implemented it by now. 

Feedback Assistant case with Apple is #12242313 and it's been escalated to get fixed for at least MacOS 14 as well as fixed in prior OS versions. 

[greg vannoy]

This doesn't explain why this has been happening in previous iterations of the Apple system software. It's been going on for me for over a year.

[jenkmeister]

The issue has been there at least since MacOS 13's release, potentially in 12.*. The introduction of Stage Manager (even if you aren't using Stage Manager) seems to have made this more frequent, and it is most frequently occuring after a drag and drop from the OS Finder window into AE. 

[WShawn]

Is the fact that selecting "Hide Others" from a different app (Safari, C4D, etc) DOES make After Effects disappear from the desktop a relevant data point? And I can then bring up other hidden apps and After Effects will STAY hidden? In fact, I can then bring up After Effects and succesfully hide it (sometimes). Mac Studio, OS 13.1.

[jenkmeister]

Yes, that's all likely related.

[greg vannoy]

There is also the issue where when AE is open and you click anything else – the finder, another app – anywhere, and AE disappears. That's another bug that's maybe related and one that's been around for just as long as this one.

[soulsun69]

How is it acceptable to Adobe for this issue to still exist 7 months later. I personally would be ashamed and embarrased if this were my company or god forbid I worked at Adobe.

[marks31742102]

Agreed! that's why we pay for a (expensive) monthly subscription...

[vcr100]

@JohnColombo How's that fix going with the Adobe Engineering team? It's been four months since your reply stating that you were investigating, whatcha guys been up too? Seems like a prettty straight forward fix. This is just another reason, added to a very long list of reasons, that I have lost confidence in Adobe. Bye bye.

[markoconnell]

Same here-

[jenkmeister]

Update: Apple have confirmed the increase of this occuring is due to a bug in the OS, broken between MacOS 12 and MacOS 13, related to the work they did with Stage Manager. Apple are currently testing a fix internally for MacOS 14. They have also given us some guidance on how we may be able workaround the bug giving some hope that a future version of AE will not have this problem on MacOS 13. 

Once the fix from Apple is available on MacOS 14 betas, and/or we can implement the workaround, we will follow up with more information.

[djs3761]

It does make sense that this is something happening at the OS level, but this ONLY happens with After Effects, nothing else in the system. 

[jenkmeister]

There may be other apps out there that run into it, but yes, AE is certainly calling some OS level APIs that the underlying implementation from Apple changed unexpectedly. If you use the AE beta builds, the build (likely 24.0x14) that we release later today has a change in it that implements the workaround from Apple and it appears to improve the hide app situation. 

[greg vannoy]

The few of these semi-detailed "explanations" that trickle out of Adobe ring hollow when this type of thing NEVER used to happen in the old days. And what I mean by "old days" were the days when we paid for our software programs outright, before this wretched monthly subscription model became the norm. We pay a premium for this software and for such a simple bug to persist for this length of time is just bad business. Nothing less. I'm disgusted with Adobe but I'm so invested in this product's toolset I feel chained down, with no power to demand better treatment but my tiny, little voice. Adobe knows it. Their inaction speaks louder than any words.

[jenkmeister]

There is a fix available now in AE Beta builds (available on CCD in the Betas section). If this problem has been plauging you, please try out the beta and see if the issue is fixed. Thank, Sean.

[jenkmeister]

Apple has informed us that a fix for this issue at the OS level has been made in MacOS 14 Beta 6 that should work with existing releases of AE. With that fix and the alternative workaround AE has implemented, users using AE 24.0 on any supported OS version or users using a supported version of AE on MacOS 14 should have the Hide App functionality restored.