unity-design team mailing list archive

[Frederik Nnaji <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Greg,

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.
>
> Mark,
>
> 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:
http://blogs.gnome.org/metacity/2009/03/09/yes-dragon-drop-its-a-pun/

"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.