I’m working from home today, and looking at some system monitory stuff in Firefox. In the background I’ve also got an Remote Desktop session open to my work PC.
Every few minutes, the corporate screensaver kicks-in on the work desktop. For some reason, RDP decides it absolutely has to show me this. It grabs focus, bringing its window into the foreground.
STOP GRABBING FOCUS, DAMMIT! I DON’T CARE IF THE SCREENSAVER HAS KICKED-IN. YOU’RE INTERRUPTING ME! JUST FLASH YOUR TASKBAR ITEM!
It even does this while connecting. If I alt-tab away onto something else while waiting for the connection, it keeps grabbing focus to show me… that it’s working on it, so please wait… Other applications do this sort of thing too.
And it keeps losing the connection, and re-connecting. But that may be a server and/or VPN issue.
(This is the RDP client in XP SP2. I’ll upgrade to SP3 in the next few days and discover if that’s any better.)
Yes if I had narrow down the most disruptive things I hate about Windows (at work) compared to OSX (at home) it would be:
1. Windows taking focus. I much prefer the OSX bouncing dock icon coupled with setting OSX to speak out an announcement – even if something like software update has fired itself up it still doesn’t take focus, I just get a bouncing icon plus the computer speaks out loud “Excuse me, Software Update needs your attention”.
2. Scroll wheel controlling the window with focus. I much rather the OSX approach of scrolling whatever it is I am pointing at – right now I can see 14 different windows on my screen (excluding those that are minimised) for example and I can simply scroll the content of any of them without having to take the focus away from this one.
Might be trivial whinges to most people, but sh#t all these sorts of things drive me crazy every day in the world of Windows… it’s the attention to detail Apple put into every millimeter of their hardware, software, and even packaging that makes life sooooo much easier.