[openbeos] Getting around "focus stealing" (was: Re: inconsistency?)

The Kopete suggestion is quite interesting: OSD overlays are in every
reasonably recent TV set, so people are used to seeing them nowadays;
they're not visually obtrusive when cleverly designed, and they
shouldn't steal input focus in any situation.

"Maybe in R2", you'd say, but how about fading every window behind the
active one (which currently gets user input) to a gray tone, and
tinting the window expecting attention to a subtle but readily
distinguishable shade of red? Or maybe another color, or maybe having
it become progressively brighter and darker again so it suits color
blind people as well.

I'm thinking on something in the lines of Exposé, but the behaviour
would be like this: every part of the desktop is painted in grayscale
(or overlaid with a translucent gray "layer", maybe with some hardware
acceleration support), except for the active window and the window
that needs attention. The latter gets a red tinting and is moved to
some place where it can be seen, and when the user selects that
window, it is put on the top on the place it was before being moved to
get attention (unless it was a popup window, in which case it should
stay where it is to avoid unnecessary mouse movement).

However this still doesn't cover the case of having a window occupying
the whole screen, possibly hiding the Deskbar. So, giving up the idea
I described above, I'd suggest having something like a translucent
picture frame which takes the borders of the screen and is, again,
tinted in red and/or flashes somehow. The user would then move the
mouse towards any border of the screen and click the translucent,
colored frame, and then the window which wanted focus would be brought
to the front and the frame would disappear. Having the mouse pointer
brought over that window or kept on the border would be a preference
setting (I'd rather have it remain on the border, but some people like
the warping mouse effect). Having this border overlay has the property
of taking Fitt's law to the extreme that you have not only "infinite
height", but also "infinite width", in all four borders of the screen.
Of course, workspace warping should be disable while the frame is
active.

I'd be glad to hear your opinion on this, and I'm also cross-posting
it to GE so we can further discuss it there, as I pretty much doubt it
would be implemented for R1 since it is a complete departure from the
R5 behaviour... But I'd love to see it in R1 nonetheless ;DD




On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 15:16:20 GMT, Mikael Jansson <tic_khr@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > While the idea seems good (I see it like Kopete signals new people
> > contacting me), I don't like it
> > very much. It's quite the same with my 2nd option. If there is some
> > free space near the focus
> > window, the new window will be shown there. Why show another bubble-
> > type window?
> >       Also, what happens when the focus window is maximized...?
> > 
> Agreed.
> 
> However, you can't just disable the feature in the Deskbar if it isn't
> expanded.  How would I then notice it?
>

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