[Usability] Re: Error dialogs (among others?) and focus stealing prevention

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

I think I came across as very overly nit-picky.  Sorry about that.  I
think I also misunderstood you when I responded as well, and that you
were just trying to suggest the changes requested in bug 151996--is
that right, or am I still misunderstanding?


On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 11:46:58 -0600, Elijah Newren <newren gmail com> wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 10:39:48 -0700, Rob Adams <readams readams net> wrote:
> > But with a modal dialog a very interesting question is raised -- if you
> > don't focus it, what do you focus?
> 
> The designated no-focus-window.
> 
> > It makes no sense to leave the
> > parent application focused, since it won't accept input.
> 
> Yes, which is why the no-focus-window is chosen.
> 
> > The modal
> > dialog needs to be kept stacked above the parent window, so its very
> > likely that it will be covering up whatever input element you were
> > typing into anyway.
> 
> Which is why you "defocus all windows" and set the demands-attention hint.
> 
> >  So the user would be left with only one option: use
> > the mouse to focus the dialog.
> 
> Or alt-tab.  (Which incidentally, needed fixing to get the order
> right).  The fact that the user needs to manually focus a window is _a
> good thing_, because it's better for the keystrokes that the user
> might be typing at the time the modal dialog appears out of nowhere to
> be ignored than to have them be given as input to the out-of-the-blue
> dialog and possibly cause an erroneous action.
> 
> > Clearly I'm not talking here about modal dialogs launched by a different
> > application -- if you're typing into a terminal, you don't want an error
> > message from evolution or whatever popping up in front of you.
> 
> Right.  Only transients of the focused window should be treated
> specially in regards to stacking.
> 
> All of this was covered by bug 151996 (well, the alt-tab issue spilled
> over to 156251).
> 
> Cheers,
> Elijah
>