Dear Apple,
There’s a long list of things I love about OS X. In so many ways, your engineers, designers and usability geniuses have anticipated my needs – even those I didn’t know I had.
But there’s one area where OS X is driving me absolutely bat-spit crazy: the way applications jump to the foreground.
Say I’m launching an app that has a lot of work to do to get started – Photoshop, for instance; pretty much anything from Microsoft Office; or, at times, Firefox or even Safari.
Do I sit staring blankly at the screen? Take a minute to speed-meditate? Stretch out the kinks in my neck? Well, sometimes – but usually, I switch to another app for a little while. Case in point: I’m working through my email inbox, and discover that Alex has sent me a Word doc to review. I’ll queue it up by launching Word, then go back to Mail.app to finish clearing – ha! – my inbox.
And I’ll start typing away, maybe using that time to compose a reply to someone instead of staring at Word’s splash screen. Meanwhile, in the background, Word is chugging away, and after a while finally opens the document.
But that’s not all it does. Word seizes focus away from my email window. With no warning, I’m suddenly typing in the open Word document. My train of thought is derailed (and as those who know me can tell you, the casualties when that happens can be appalling); my workflow suddenly hits a logjam; Bad Things Happen.
Or a background utility will suddenly jump to the foreground with a dialog box alerting me to some desperately dire condition – usually one that actually could safely wait a few hours, days or years. This time, those keystrokes vanish into thin air… or trigger the wrong button. (I had that happen with “Restart” a few minutes ago. Reeeeeally not helpful.)
I can respect the need from time to time to get my attention – although most programs drastically overestimate their own importance – but that doesn’t mean an app needs to steal the focus from whatever you’re working on in any but the most urgent cases. (And in those urgent cases, for god’s sake, either don’t feed keystrokes into the dialog box until the user explicitly selects it, or disable keyboard shortcuts.)
Look, Apple, this isn’t the end of the world. But one of the most amazing things about OS X is how seamlessly it works. This spotlight-grabbing behaviour is obnoxious; it’s anything but seamless; and it detracts from what users are trying to do.
Please: make it stop.
