Stay 4+

I have to concur with other reviewers: I WANTED this app to be my go-to solution, since I need to switch between laptop-only and laptop-with-external display many times a day. The problem is that it doesn't quite get there... there's always manual re-positioning that needs to be done to get me back to where I need to be, between desktop spaces, browser windows, etc.

I rely heavily on spaces and multiple desktops, browsers with windows open on different desktops between different monitors, etc. Stay's re-positioning of things seems to give a nod to how I set things up, but it never recreates things even close to perfectly, relying on my to get the rest of the way there.

Another weird issue is that it sometimes seems to switch the order of some of my desktop spaces even when I haven't unplugged or changed anything... I'll start with my Chrome tab second and Safari third, and suddenly with no warning or change to the screen config, I will have Safari second and Chrome fourth or something similar. Only a minor annoyance, but unpredictability is bad. No clear reason why this happens, but it appears to be related to this product at the very least.

This is a decent utility that makes my life easier as I swap my macbook pro amonst a variety of external displays (two Dell displays at work, occassional conference room display, iMac running in target mode at home). It gets me about 60-70% of the way there. However, it seems to be unable to restore window height when moving between different display sizes. Also, it doesn’t put all windows back in their proper location or in their Space (virtual desktop). I’m often having to move windows from the default Space to the correct one. Finally, applications which tend to have lots of windows (e.g., Safari) tend to not be restored correctly (both in terms of size and Space).

This is better than nothing, but it could be a lot better.

I was desperate for a way to keep things organized as I docked/undocked and this worked OK. I was already using BetterTouchTool to get the full potential out of my Magic Touchpad and they’re constantly adding other automation features. Shortly after buying Stay, BTT added the same functionality and for me it works much better and requires one less app.