On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 02:34, Greg K Nicholson
<greg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 25 May 2010 12:29, Mark Shuttleworth <
mark@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Focus stealing *is* less of a problem than making all other window
> openings unpredictable.
I've proposed a solution (from a user experience point of view) that
prevents focus-stealing while also keeping window-opening predictable:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/metacity/+bug/67476/comments/16
I don't know how practical it would be to implement.
Focus stealing is not solved by band aid.
The whole problem lies in the DE's behaviour concerning focus. We have to different focuses that need to be aligned: User's Ayatana, UI's Ayatana.
Most of the communication aka interaction between man and machine follows a visual focus. A way to represent this is the mouse cursor with all its dynamic behaviour and influence on the DE's positioning of dialogs and context menus, perhaps soon also context overlay widget-like dialogs.
Shane Fagan had a thread on this called "[Ayatana] Redesigning the Ubuntu mouse cursor for simple notification of app attention".
I've been thinking a lot about focus behaviour, and i think it is a good thing to discuss, since the overall improvement of behaviour in this direction would make the whole user experience more powerful, putting the user into control and giving him a more reliable interface to operate.
I can think of another Metacity bug, that has been discussed at length over the last decade:
"Focus stealing" is a big issue, since it translates to "not being aligned with the user's direction of behaviour". I think any creative discussion on metaphors related to this topic will spawn great ideas that will make IxD better already.