matsu

The Great Focus Heist

All programmers and developers, repeat slowly after me: – The USER chooses which window or program has the focus, not the system, or any application.

There’s nothing more annoying than being in the middle of something, click here, click there, and suddenly a window (or whole program) comes up, and you end up clicking what you shouldn’t, and many times you have to find out what you did.

This happens all the time, both in Mac OS X and in Windows XP. On the Mac, some programs do the right thing by bouncing the application icon, stating “There’s something you need to attend to!” and on Windows some applications do the same by flashing the application button on the task bar.

But you only need one bad apple (no pun intended) to ruin your whole experience.

Many times is the system itself that throws windows and requesters into focus. In Mac OS X, for instance, if you were connected to a network drive, and then lose the connection, a pop-up will, erm, pop-up asking you if you want to disconnect the volume in question, which is very annoying.  In Windows, although things are getting better, there are still lots of applications (and the system itself) that steal your focus from you.

It should be illegal for your focus to be stolen!!