For those of you like me who look at the computer screen and keyboard simultaneously, focus theft can be a serious time waster. I’ve lost entire sentences in emails to popup dialogue boxes. Even those who affix their eyes to the monitor are at risk of terrible things happening. For example, you are typing something up and a program gives you a dialogue box to restart your system. Your next character in your typing happens to be a capital “O.” Capital “O” just happens to be the hotkey which clicks the “Ok” button to shut down the computer. Now your document is lost and you are left frustrated.

There are several notorious focus thieves. This is my top 5 list of usual suspects.

#5: Installation programs

If you are in a position like mine, you will install a great number of programs throughout a given year. Installation programs offer two things I really dislike, the first being status bars and the second is focus theft. Installations can take several minutes, and being the multi-tasker I am, I will minimize the installer and perform other tasks. Nearly all installer programs will popup when they are finished, steal the mouse and keyboard focus, and tell you “Hey dude, I’m done installing!” Wonderful, except for the part where I don’t care and nor do I need the focus stolen for that. This one is only a minor annoyance to me and probably even less so to the general public, who may installs one program every few months. They only get worse from here.

#4: Flash

I hate Flash. I don’t know if that was clear in my flash intro blog, but if it wasn’t, let me make it clear here. I really hate flash. So many popular and wonderful websites use flash as either a primary content provider or an tertiary product like banner ads or animated pictures. Flash has the ability to steal the focus from the rest of the webpage. This is the default operation when you click on any flash object, whether on purpose or accident. Say you are clicking away from an input box and accidentally click one of the flash ads that monopolize the right margins of most websites. You then go to use your scroll wheel on your mouse to find that the page is not scrolling. Ugh! How annoying!

Even worse is a flash object that can be programmed to steal the focus outright. This renders the entire page useless until you click a blank space on it. Why is this even legal?

#3: Anti-Virus Programs

You may be thinking that anti-virus popup messages should be the one thing everyone would want to have. I agree, to an extent. I don’t like that these dialogue boxes often include hotkeys which perform potentially dangerous actions. By all means, please let these steal focus so that people are made aware of virus/malware/spyware infections. However, all options should require some form of user interaction beyond simple alpha-numeric keystrokes.

For example, let’s say you’re prompted with an anti-virus dialogue that has hotkeys to ignore, repair, or delete a file. Let’s say the file in question is winword.exe, the application file for Microsoft Word. You are happily typing away when this happens and you press “D”, which is the delete hotkey. Goodbye MS Word, hello two hours of re-installing. You might get lucky and hit the repair hotkey, but Murphy’s Law would disagree. The ignore hotkey is no better either because then you might unwittingly send that document on and infect others.

#2: Instant Messaging

Instant messaging and the Internet are married. So many people use IM that it has become an almost integrated part of our comminication. Great as it may be, new messages can popup new windows and steal keyboard focus. This may not imply catastrophic system failure, but it can be catastrophic to your social life.

This is a scenario that has played out many times in many workplaces. An employee is complaining to another employee or a friend on their IM. Their boss sends them an instant message just as they are typing “my boss is such a tight-wad” or something a lot more salacious and less appropriate for this blog. The return key is struck and the pink slip is on the desk. Sure, employees should be careful when speaking ill of their boss, but if it wasn’t for focus theft they might still be employed.

#1: Windows Update

Yes, the biggest, baddest, worse focus thief of them all is Windows Update. Seriously, this box will pop up every 15 minutes if an update has been installed and you have not restarted the computer. Capital “N” is the reboot hotkey. “N” is the 5th most commonly used letter in the English language. “N” is the 18th most commonly used first letter of a word and may not be capitalized, but who is to say that caps lock isn’t stuck or you are writing an acronym? In any case, you combine the frequency of the letter “N” and the frequency of the windows update dialogue and you have a recipe for disaster.

If you have never accidentally rebooted a system as a result of the windows update dialogue, you are in the small minority. Even if you own a Mac, chances are you work on a windows machine or interact with one at some point.

Sure, there are ways to change or disable this behavior as there are with many of the focus thieves. The default behavior, frequency of popups, and the letter ‘N’ being the reboot key makes this the prince of focus thieves.

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