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

[Karim Nassar <Karim Nassar NAU EDU>]

On Wed, 2004-10-27 at 10:39, Rob Adams wrote:
> But with a modal dialog a very interesting question is raised -- if you 
> don't focus it, what do you focus?  It makes no sense to leave the 
> parent application focused, since it won't accept input. 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.  
 
(Given that I agree the modal dialog must be on top...)

If user is typing, and we don't focus the dialog (keeping focus on last
window) user can finish the sentence. Even if the dialog accidentally
covers up the work, the last few keystrokes end up at the intended
target avoiding the accidental dismissal issue. IMHO this would be a
Good Thing. One solution for the covered up work would be some sort of
transparent dialogs as described in "The Humane Interface".

If one is mousing, I think that the lack of focus is not such a big deal
as long as button presses are passed through.

> So the user would be left with only one option: use 
> the mouse to focus the dialog.

Hands on keyboard: Alt-tab. (We can set the tab order to support this,
                   yes?
Hand on mouse: No problem, right?

> 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.

Seems like the notification applet would be a great place for this type
of feedback.

\<.