From: Juerd Waalboer Date: 01:57 on 20 Jan 2008 Subject: Software that keeps stealing focus. Ugly Software, If I actively ignored your splash screen by clicking another window, then why the hell must you insist on grabbing the focus when your main application windows is finally there? And then, why is it necessary that you do this for each of the twelve documents that I opened, with a painful two to three seconds interval? I'M TRYING TO TYPE AN EMAIL, DAMNIT. Await your turn, I will attend to you later. I hate you, OpenOffice dot org, I hate you very much. The universe doesn't revolve around you! Stop grabbing focus and stacking your windows on top of others. Oh, and quit that awful resetting to full window maximization that you like to do every other week.
From: Peter da Silva Date: 14:46 on 20 Jan 2008 Subject: Re: Software that keeps stealing focus. On 2008-01-19, at 19:57, Juerd Waalboer wrote: > I hate you, OpenOffice dot org, I hate you very much. The universe > doesn't revolve around you! Stop grabbing focus and stacking your > windows on top of others. Oh, and quit that awful resetting to full > window maximization that you like to do every other week. The most hateful thing is that some of Apple's own damn software does the same hateful thing.
From: Juerd Waalboer Date: 18:01 on 20 Jan 2008 Subject: Re: Software that keeps stealing focus. Peter da Silva skribis 2008-01-20 8:46 (-0600): > The most hateful thing is that some of Apple's own damn software does > the same hateful thing. Apple has little to do with my hate and I'd like to keep it that way.
From: Peter da Silva Date: 18:59 on 20 Jan 2008 Subject: Re: Software that keeps stealing focus. On 2008-01-20, at 12:01, Juerd Waalboer wrote: > Peter da Silva skribis 2008-01-20 8:46 (-0600): >> The most hateful thing is that some of Apple's own damn software >> does the same hateful thing. > > Apple has little to do with my hate and I'd like to keep it that way. One of the reasons I like OS X is that it's about the only system where this particular kind of hateful behavior isn't so common as to be beneath notice. It's a pity the Plan 9 model, where the user and not the application creates the windows, didn't catch on.
From: Robert Rothenberg Date: 16:48 on 20 Jan 2008 Subject: Re: Software that keeps stealing focus. On 20/01/08 01:57 Juerd Waalboer wrote: > Ugly Software, > > If I actively ignored your splash screen by clicking another window, Splash screens are hateful. I was about to say a better alternative to say an app is loading and initialising is some kind of indicator in a corner panel, but then I remembered that I hate the bouncing icons in the OS/X panel too. > then why the hell must you insist on grabbing the focus when your > main application windows is finally there? Why would you bother using another application? > And then, why is it necessary that you do this for each of the twelve > documents that I opened, with a painful two to three seconds interval? > ... Even better: an application is able to steal focus while you're typing in a password. That's my favourite. > I hate you, OpenOffice dot org, I hate you very much. ... Ah yes. OpenOffice is the open source alternate hate to Microsoft Office hate.
From: Ann Barcomb Date: 17:56 on 20 Jan 2008 Subject: Re: Software that keeps stealing focus. On Sun, 20 Jan 2008, Robert Rothenberg wrote: > Ah yes. OpenOffice is the open source alternate hate to Microsoft Office > hate. It's so easy to hate OpenOffice, because they made it work and look like Microsoft Office, only slower. I hate the UI, I hate the way it steals window focus, and I would never use it at all if people didn't send me hateful .doc and .xls files and sometimes expect me to return the same sorts of documents. I guess it's designed to make it really easy for MS users to switch, without actually giving them a reason to bother.
From: Jarkko Hietaniemi Date: 18:50 on 20 Jan 2008 Subject: Re: Software that keeps stealing focus. Ann Barcomb wrote: > On Sun, 20 Jan 2008, Robert Rothenberg wrote: > >> Ah yes. OpenOffice is the open source alternate hate to Microsoft Office >> hate. > > It's so easy to hate OpenOffice, because they made it work and look > like Microsoft Office, only slower. I hate the UI, I hate the way it And don't forget crashing more. It's an engineering achievement in itself to crash more than Redmondware. > steals window focus, and I would never use it at all if people didn't > send me hateful .doc and .xls files and sometimes expect me to return > the same sorts of documents. > > I guess it's designed to make it really easy for MS users to switch, > without actually giving them a reason to bother. > >
From: Steff Date: 19:16 on 20 Jan 2008 Subject: Re: Software that keeps stealing focus. Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote: > Ann Barcomb wrote: >> On Sun, 20 Jan 2008, Robert Rothenberg wrote: >> >>> Ah yes. OpenOffice is the open source alternate hate to Microsoft Office >>> hate. >> It's so easy to hate OpenOffice, because they made it work and look >> like Microsoft Office, only slower. I hate the UI, I hate the way it > > And don't forget crashing more. It's an engineering achievement in > itself to crash more than Redmondware. The autorecover feature, however, does seem to work much more reliably than MS Office's. This apparent point in OpenOffice's favour is of course in itself a hateful thing, indicating as it does a horribly fatalistic attitude to crashing bugs. ObExtraHate: jmerely wanting to be familiar to users of MS Office doesn't make reproducing the 16-bit limit on number of lines in a spreadsheet (which I believe even MS has abandoned now) a good plan. S
From: Dave Brown Date: 20:41 on 20 Jan 2008 Subject: Re: Software that keeps stealing focus. On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 07:16:18PM +0000, Steff wrote: > Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote: >> Ann Barcomb wrote: >>> On Sun, 20 Jan 2008, Robert Rothenberg wrote: >>> >>>> Ah yes. OpenOffice is the open source alternate hate to Microsoft Office >>>> hate. >>> It's so easy to hate OpenOffice, because they made it work and look >>> like Microsoft Office, only slower. I hate the UI, I hate the way it >> >> And don't forget crashing more. It's an engineering achievement in >> itself to crash more than Redmondware. > > The autorecover feature, however, does seem to work much more reliably than > MS Office's. Wow, really? So what does MS Office's do, then, actually set your documents on fire or something? Not only has Open Office's autorecover never actually recovered anything for me, but the way that it pops up when you happen not to have OpenOffice open and then you make the foolish mistake of trying to open an OpenOffice document is hateful. Apparently OpenOffice confuses itself with an operating system, and so the act of trying to open up a word processor document must by necessity involve a great amount of trumpets, fanfares, and of course, the Ritual Of Recovering Documents. And if there are multiple documents that it deems worthy of Recovery, it will of course open every single one of them. Suddenly your innocent act of opening up a spreadsheet has turned into a battle with the Hydra. Lord help you if you decide you don't care about some document or other and delete it, and OpenOffice decides to recover it for you. It'll be trying to recover that document lo until the end of the ages, and there's no way to tell it you simply don't care about that document any more. > This apparent point in OpenOffice's favour is of course in itself a > hateful thing, indicating as it does a horribly fatalistic attitude to > crashing bugs. No, it's a hatefully-crappy poorly-implemented implementation of a half-assed misunderstanding of the otherwise sound concept of "crash-only software". --Dave
From: David Cantrell Date: 15:31 on 21 Jan 2008 Subject: Re: Software that keeps stealing focus. On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 06:56:11PM +0100, Ann Barcomb wrote: > It's so easy to hate OpenOffice, because they made it work and look > like Microsoft Office, only slower. They did such a bad job of working and looking like MS Office that I prefer to use MS Office.
From: Phil Pennock Date: 23:12 on 21 Jan 2008 Subject: Re: Software that keeps stealing focus. On 2008-01-21 at 15:31 +0000, David Cantrell wrote: > On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 06:56:11PM +0100, Ann Barcomb wrote: > > It's so easy to hate OpenOffice, because they made it work and look > > like Microsoft Office, only slower. > > They did such a bad job of working and looking like MS Office that I > prefer to use MS Office. Me too. :^( The _only_ thing that OpenOffice has going for it is that foreign language dictionaries are free. Once you finally figure out the juju to install them and make them work. And learn how you need to fight OO to make it willing to actually use them. In retrospect, it would have been worth the money to buy the dictionaries for MS Office. My wife might not have retreated from her willingness to try other OSes. OO is _not_ the application to put on a Windows box to showcase what modern GNU/Linux has to offer. -Phil
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 10:28 on 22 Jan 2008 Subject: Re: Software that keeps stealing focus. On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 02:57:15AM +0100, Juerd Waalboer wrote: > Ugly Software, > > If I actively ignored your splash screen by clicking another window, > then why the hell must you insist on grabbing the focus when your > main application windows is finally there? Pertinent hate indeed. It's not as bad, but Ubuntu's Sound Juicer is also hateful. It has no option to disable the "helpful" popup for "I've finished extracting the CD" It's not like I haven't noticed - it *has* an option to eject the CD. FUCKING THING. DIE DIE DIE. Nicholas Clark
From: Juerd Waalboer Date: 10:57 on 22 Jan 2008 Subject: Re: Software that keeps stealing focus. Nicholas Clark skribis 2008-01-22 10:28 (+0000): > Pertinent hate indeed. It's not as bad, but Ubuntu's Sound Juicer is > also hateful. It has no option to disable the "helpful" popup for > "I've finished extracting the CD" Ubuntu is exceptionally skilled at writing software that demand ones focus. Another exhibit: the upgrade thingy. After downlodaing the updated packages, its window will pop itself up to the front, and automatically start installing the new packages. It doesn't need your attention, and even if it would, that would still not be a valid excuse for being so incredibly annoying. The only kind of warning that should ever do this is, is in the disaster-imminent-if-you-don't-act-now category: empty battery, house on fire, nuclear waste in lost+found. But Ubuntu does it even when it has NO WARNING whatsoever. It's just demanding attention, implicitly shouting "Hey, I'm going to INSTALL them now. Look at me, INSTALLING! Whoooooo! Oh, that's a nice password you have there."
From: Hakim Cassimally Date: 11:56 on 22 Jan 2008 Subject: Re: Software that keeps stealing focus. On 22/01/2008, Juerd Waalboer <juerd@xxxxxxxxxxx.xx> wrote: > Ubuntu is exceptionally skilled at writing software that demand ones > focus. Another exhibit: the upgrade thingy. After downlodaing the > updated packages, its window will pop itself up to the front, and > automatically start installing the new packages. > > It doesn't need your attention, and even if it would, that would still > not be a valid excuse for being so incredibly annoying. > > The only kind of warning that should ever do this is, is in the > disaster-imminent-if-you-don't-act-now category: empty battery, house on > fire, nuclear waste in lost+found. On that note, another hate. The empty battery warnings *don't* get shown when an app is fullscreened. Because it's absolutely fine for my laptop to fall asleep without warning when I'm watching a video in Totem. -- osfameron
From: Juerd Waalboer Date: 12:55 on 22 Jan 2008 Subject: Re: Software that keeps stealing focus. Ilmari Vacklin skribis 2008-01-22 13:37 (+0200): > This is reportedly a bug in Metacity, not in update-manager: I'm not using Metacity, though.
From: Ilmari Vacklin Date: 11:36 on 23 Jan 2008 Subject: Re: Software that keeps stealing focus. On Tue, Jan 22, 2008 at 01:55:20PM +0100, Juerd Waalboer wrote: > Ilmari Vacklin skribis 2008-01-22 13:37 (+0200): > > This is reportedly a bug in Metacity, not in update-manager: > > I'm not using Metacity, though. Then the bug is probably in the window manager you do use. Oh, and I did *mean* to reply to the mailing list, but apparently I've forgotten how to use Mutt, the king of weird keys.
From: Peter da Silva Date: 15:47 on 22 Jan 2008 Subject: Re: Software that keeps stealing focus. On 2008-01-22, at 04:57, Juerd Waalboer wrote: > The only kind of warning that should ever do this is, is in the > disaster-imminent-if-you-don't-act-now category: empty battery, > house on > fire, nuclear waste in lost+found. But Ubuntu does it even when it has > NO WARNING whatsoever. It's just demanding attention, implicitly > shouting "Hey, I'm going to INSTALL them now. Look at me, INSTALLING! > Whoooooo! Oh, that's a nice password you have there." Nicely worded. :) Kind of like a cat dropping a dead mouse on your coverlet?
From: Michael Poole Date: 12:41 on 22 Jan 2008 Subject: Re: Software that keeps stealing focus. Nicholas Clark writes: > On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 02:57:15AM +0100, Juerd Waalboer wrote: >> Ugly Software, >> >> If I actively ignored your splash screen by clicking another window, >> then why the hell must you insist on grabbing the focus when your >> main application windows is finally there? > > Pertinent hate indeed. It's not as bad, but Ubuntu's Sound Juicer is also > hateful. It has no option to disable the "helpful" popup for "I've finished > extracting the CD" > > It's not like I haven't noticed - it *has* an option to eject the CD. > > FUCKING THING. DIE DIE DIE. Also hateful about Sound Juicer: Sunday was the *fourth* anniversary of a bug report against it that says it does stupid things if the user tries to use Sound Juicer with two CD drives at the same time. For some reason, it is deemed an "enhancement" to change the behavior that changing the current-drive preference in one instance updates the same preference simultaneously in all other instances. The other instances apparently respond by hanging in the middle of their rips. If the software were less hateful, the preference part would define the *default* drive rather than the current one, and let users select the current source the way they do in other applications: through an "Open ..." dialog. The staggering cost of a new variable and code to reuse the drive-selection dialog is obviously not worth it. Michael Poole
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 19:48 on 22 Jan 2008 Subject: Re: Software that keeps stealing focus. Nicholas Clark wrote: > Pertinent hate indeed. It's not as bad, but Ubuntu's Sound Juicer is also > hateful. It has no option to disable the "helpful" popup for "I've finished > extracting the CD" > > It's not like I haven't noticed - it *has* an option to eject the CD. That's sort of like remote controls with eject buttons.
From: Phil Pennock
Date: 20:08 on 22 Jan 2008
Subject: Re: Software that keeps stealing focus.
On 2008-01-22 at 11:48 -0800, Michael G Schwern wrote:
> Nicholas Clark wrote:
>> It's not like I haven't noticed - it *has* an option to eject the CD.
>
> That's sort of like remote controls with eject buttons.
What, both useful?
Nicholas appeared to say that notification on desktop was redundant
since the disc will already have been ejected automatically, without
interfering with the work, without having to worry about waiting for
spin-down, or anything -- it's ejected automatically as soon as it's
safe to do so.
When I use a remote control to eject a disc from a DVD player, then:
(1) It will be out by the time I'm by the DVD player, so I can put in a
new disc quickly and get back with minimal time wastage
(2) If the disc-tray-chasing cat is in one of Those Moods, then I can
distract him over by the sofa and eject the disc. That lets the
disc get safely out, drive intact and disc unscratched. I then
just have to leg-block the cat whilst the tray goes back in, to make
sure that it makes it in to safety without being paw-blocked. Still
have to wander over, still have to deal with the cat, but the
logistics just work out better and I can deal with two arms and a
free leg, instead of needing three arms.
Not all features are meant for all people. Doesn't make them useless
features.
-Phil
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