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List:       kde-look
Subject:    Pop-up alert dialogs.
From:       Mariusz Pekala <skoot () poczta ! onet ! pl>
Date:       2001-11-19 13:19:22
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Hello,
There is a bug (well... kind of) in the general idea of pop-up windows. As 
you may be interested in this issue, please consider the following:

Imagine this: you write a letter. Suddenly a pop-up widow pops-up and takes 
keyboard focus.
You didn't noticed and pressed a Return key. The only thing you noticed was 
disappearing window with some very, very important notice. Now you think - 
what was that???
Usually I experience this on a Windows system; my machine acts as a print 
server, some people make printouts, and sometimes the printer runs out of 
paper. In such a case, a message pops-up asking me whether I would like to 
try again or delete the printout from the queue. The worst is that the button 
'delete' is the default. It happens often (as I am typing relatively fast) 
that I press 'space' or 'Enter' key before I notice the pop-up - so sometimes 
people lost their printouts.
It was an example- but the message may be for example: Do you want to erase 
all your files? [[Yes]] [No]. :-)
As I said, I usually experience this on Windows system, but the same idea 
lives in the KDE.

I don't say that I know how to engineer alert windows in a proper way, but 
this is my proposition:
Use a windows that jump on the top of all other, but does not take keyboard 
focus. It may be (say) a blinking, yellow page at the bottom-right corner of 
the desktop. The messsage may wait for mouse click on it's button, but should 
keep itself away from the keyboard! The key-press-events should keep going to 
the application that was receiving them before the pop-up (I hate to retype a 
part of text that disappeared together with the pop-up).

The current way the pop-ups work is rather designed for people that don't use 
keyboard or use it rarely and slowly; or for people that type without looking 
at keyboard - I cannot.

Forgive me my language - 1) English is not my native one, 2) I was a Windows 
programmer, so I don't know (yet) the terminology that is used in the KDE 
environment.

--Mariusz


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