Fine, instead of stealing all the focus, and popping into the middle of the screen because you MIGHT be involved in something important and getting interrupted sucks, you could pop a little warning into the lower corner like an EMAIL NOTIFICATION ALREADY DOES, nonintrusive, and it stays there until you deal with it.
Last job, I had a twitchy program we had to work with, and anything that took focus while trying to fill in the damned fields would blank out the page all the way back to the top, making you have to start all over again once you dealt with whatever popped up.
While resembling the description of programmers in at least two of four dimensions, and admitting that I’ve been a systems administrator for the past nearly 20 years, I’ve ranted the similar rant privately in front of my screen many times.
I don’t do it publicly since 9.9 out 10 people would have no idea what I was ranting about.
Focus stealing is, minimally, annoying and, potentially, dangerous.
This message brought to you by the society to promote run on sentences, abuse commas, and the letter “Q”.
I’m a software developer, and I’ll have you know my moral development is at least at the level of a badger’s.
Programs steal focus because their designers were dipshits or ignorant and their programmers were either browbeaten, overly obedient, or also dipshits. There is NO REASON for a program to grab the focus and jam it onto some input control so you can enter something unintentionall (and thus make the form disappear unread). NO REASON.
Outlook does this to me all the time with scheduled notifications and I HATE IT.
Now, this isn’t saying that there is no reason to slap a topmost popup over your screen and cover up what you were working on. There are lots of potential reasons to do that. But there is NO reason to take the focus away too. It’s quite simple to make a window keep itself on top of everything without it stealing focus.
The coders were dipshits. That is that. Presuming my bosses didn’t make me (I’m overly obedient), I would never do such a thing. It’s sheer idiocy.
(Now, I did just yesterday decide to trap the mouse cursor in a tiny little box and essentially deprive you of the use of your computer, potentially for hours at a time. But that’s completely different.)
All my desktop icons are on my task bar. My desktop is nornally just completely black. A while back, before my wife got her computer, I did a Print Screen of Google, and used that for my desktop. It was fun watching my wife furiously clicking “buttons” that weren’t really there, like the X button, for closing the screen. It was a riot — as when she finally realized what was going on, she began to blast me with 1920s style death rays eminating from her eyeballs.
I just wanted to say that, pretty much as a result of this thread, I’ve ordered all developers in our shop to rewrite our apps that steal focus. We do have one or two, like a propriety IM program, for example. If I’m typing here, and that window opens, my sentence continues in it. Therefore, I’ve ordered that instead of stealing focus, that a user be notified of an incoming IM by a pleasant audible sound, like a quiet ding, and a flashing notification on the task bar. (That latter is necessary in case someone is away from his desk; then, upon his return, he will know that he has an IM.) I was practically cheered by the guys, who completely agreed with me. (And believe me, they express themselves whenever they disagree.) So thanks to the OP and to other contributors who made me aware of this issue. I mean, I knew about it, and I knew it sucked, but it just never dawned on me that I could do anything about it.
Is it true that Macs don’t have this problem? I always assumed not, but the last time this topic came up even Mac people were complaining about the issue and that surprised me.
Thanks, Indistinguishable!