By bb

Operating systems, windows and focus.

Hi, my name is Brad Tomlinson. You can print that, if this makes it anywhere.

Into it:

Goddamn fucking window focus. As in, application focus, context switching, more so, and in great pain - forced window focus switching. One just fucking happened to me then as I was typing this sentence, and again just now.

(ps, FUCK YOU ADOBE, every single one of your goddamn applications has a separate updater and they all run on different schedules)

All the technology in the world to create these wonderful, shiny fucking multi-tasking, multi window, multi screen capable operating systems and there's still some primal need to rip my fucking input focus away from what I'm working on at the moment so you can show me a non-interactive status bar or some cripplingly irrelevant fucking popup that's simply telling me that everything is ok with the world.

Stop, just, for the love of god, stop. Most of you still have installers or processes that take forever to run, I just want you to do your thing and leave me out of it. Please.

No application should illicit a context switch, ever. We're all quite aware and in love with our computers these days and how we expect them to function, please. Just blink. or make a noise. The following actions should default someone to burn in hell:

  • Snatching my focus just as I hit the fucking enter key. How does this always happen? What the fuck did I just confirm?
  • Your installer has arbitrarily reached the next stage but doesn't need input from me
  • Something is already updating something automatically and I can't do anything about it
  • My X has changed but it's something thats painfully fucking obvious (I've added some storage / memory / whatever, yeah, I was there too)
  • etc etc etc, etc.

Consider the exponential curve that exists here - yeah, its such a neat idea that your application pops up something, on the toolbar, in the general window space, or snaps my focus back because it needs some attention. Hurrah for you, asshole. What happens when I have ten or twenty of these goddamn apps installed on my machine?

I can't type an email without a balloon popping up. And then another. Then some sort of background process or install takes my focus. Then another one does. Then UAC fires up and the whole screen's gone black and the bubbles are still popping and for the love of every baby seal ever born, I want someone to just KICK ME IN THE GODDAMN BALLS and give me a sheet of graph paper and a fucking pencil so I can actually put some ideas down in one continuous stream of thought without all this goddamn bullshit. If the trend keeps up and every fucking screen grabber or antivirus or adobe / office / nokia / whatever pile of shit, there's no more desktop computing.

We'll all go back to having a dusty workstation in the corner that we occasionally look at with a mix of fear and contempt while we shit in bedpans and scrawl things on chalkboards rather than risk trying to use the goddamn thing.

Love,

Brad T.