markus’ blog

Don’t give me focus!

January 5th, 2007

It’s one of those days. Yes, exactly. I was installing software for evaluation on Windows when it happened at least three times to me that I didn’t see the last screen during the installation of this software because right in the second the screen came up I was writing text in another application and pressing either Return or Escape. They keystroke got received by the installers last screen and disappeared; right before I could read anything.
I really hate this.

This also happened to me the other day with a web-based newsletter application I was using. The application had opened a popup with a textarea which got updated every time there was something to report, like invalid email addresses. Every time the textarea got updated, the popup window received focus.

Guess what? I was happily surfing in FF the other time and closing some tabs with CTRL-W when out of a sudden the newsletter application grabbed the focus and, you guessed it, I was closing the popup which sends the newsletter out. Oh, did I mention that having this popup open was vital for sending the newsletter, i.e. closing the popup would stop sending the newsletter?

I complained immediately to the software company which admitted the problem but was unable to fix this because “that’s the way internet explorer works, try FF”. Ok, so I’m stupid, right, because I didn’t use FF? Learned another lesson, man.

Application developers should taken away the right to grab focus and bring out a window to the front which automatically grabs keyboard actions. It’s ridiculous.

Btw, I updated my blogs’ theme. Why is it so … spare? a) because most people today use some kind of RSS reader software anywhere and since I publish my articles as a whole there’s no need to visit the page and b) because I’m no designer, I don’t like the existing designs and don’t want to be just another copy of a theme. It’s basically a rip-off of Asa Dotzlers blog at the moment; sorry for that :-)

Entry Filed under: Rants,Software