Re: Stealing focus! -- PCTECH

On 3/26/2008 8:55 AM, David Gibbs arranged the binary bits such that:

Joe Pluta wrote:

Three different issues, all incredibly important. First is stealing
focus; I hate that as much as you do, although it's important sometimes. What is needed is a couple of trays for "important" messages, and the ability to assign messages a priority.

That would be very nice to have ... if an app is running and doesn't
have focus, and it needs to have some kind of action performed, let it
pop up a message on the notification tray.

What I would like is that when a pop-up sets the focus to itself that it locks out input for 1 second. No accidental keystrokes but not really that long of a delay if you are expecting it and ready to pounce.

Second is the ability to choose proper defaults. A default that
reboots your machine is about as brain-dead as you can get.

What is worse is the Norton Anti-Virus Liveupdate pop up. You only get an OK button and the close X. Even if you click on the X to close the window trying to tell it "NOT NOW STUPID" you are rebooting. All you can do is slide the window clear to the right so that no actions can be clicked until you are ready to reboot. One of the reasons I switched to AVG and now sell it. When it needs a reboot to finish an update it tells you that but happily says it will wait if you want it to.

I would be satisfied with a simple "Ok to restart your computer now?"
followed by "Are you sure? Type "YES" in the box to complete the restart".

A default of NO wouldn't help much if you happened to be about to start typing the word Yesterday when focus was grabbed.

And finally, I'd like to be able to add certain safeguards especially
to the reboot process so that I could indicate that if Program A is
open, reboot can be canceled.

What about if, before Windows started the reboot process, it checked to
see if there were any active applications (not flagged as daemon), and
asks you if you really want to restart.

Wouldn't really take that much. Write a trivial app that just sits in the tray until it gets the standard Windows shutdown event and pops up its own window and if you deny it tells Windows that it can't be shut down right now. It would have to deal with the time limit to respond before Windows declares it "not responding" and start to kill it. Other applications might close first but things like Word or Excel with an unsaved modified document act the same way asking if you want to save first.

Of course the whole idea of requiring a restart is kind of silly anyways. I can understand the need if core, kernel level, components are being updated ... but (IMO) most stuff should be able to be unloaded & reloaded without requiring a restart.

Then again, zonealarm is probably a wired in pretty deep. So it might not be an option.

Or look at it this way. If ZA is replacing an active program it has to 1) shutdown (no longer protect the system) 2) replace the program 3) restart the function. Now how long might 2 take and what can happen in that window. Remember, Windows isn't like i5/OS that can replace an active program by putting it in QRPLOBJ with a random name and have the active usage point to it and new usage gets the new object.