There’s little more frustrating for a regular computer user than a pop-up that demands your undivided attention right when you’re in the middle of something crucial.
No one wants to deal with pop-ups. They’re a bane of the modern life, from ads to irritating dialogue boxes, and should be put out to pasture. But it isn’t necessarily the pop up that’s actually the problem – it’s more the fact that it steals focus.
Stealing focus is where the computer completely ignores what you’re trying to do, say typing out an email, a news story, or a piece of code, and jumps the cursor to some dialogue box demanding an answer or password.
You, the productive user, continue merrily bashing out your missive, unknowingly typing into the newly selected box. Most of the time it’s just the password field, but if you are particularly unlucky you’ll find that the window will be focused on either an accept, OK or cancel button.
The useful shortcuts that allow you to select and activate buttons with the keyboard are your undoing here. They allow you to hit the direction keys or a key that represents the correct button – “a” for accept, for instance – to select the right answer and press either the enter key or the spacebar to action your selection. You can see where this is going.
If you’re in full flow – and it seemingly only happens to me when I’m typing at mach one – you can unwittingly action the pop up so fast that you don’t even know what you’ve done.
Minecraft founder Markus “Notch” Persson, recently suffered what will probably go down as the pop-up problem of the year, the Windows 10 upgrade dialogue:
Win 7 just popped up a window AS I WAS TYPING, asking me if I wanted to upgrade to 10, captured the space bar, aaand pic.twitter.com/yKrBSlyUY6
— Markus Persson (@notch) November 27, 2015
While Microsoft’s User Account Control system, which came with Windows Vista, was particularly annoying, seemingly popping up and demanding your password every five minutes, Apple is no saint either.
My current top annoyance with OS X is the iCloud password demand. No matter how many times I enter the correct password it still pops up just when I’m about five minutes from deadline and still have 1,000 words to write.
I realise the computer not doing what I want it to is a very small annoyance in the grand scheme of things. But day after day, time after time, it’s enough to make me want to hurl the monitor out of the nearest window.
Why anyone thought it was a good idea to steal focus when the user is obviously busy I will never know, but please, for the love of all office workers and computer users everywhere, just stop it.
