Re: Turn off background click behavior on a window?
Re: Turn off background click behavior on a window?
- Subject: Re: Turn off background click behavior on a window?
- From: Steve Mills <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 14:47:31 -0500
On Oct 29, 2014, at 14:15:50, Kyle Sluder <email@hidden> wrote:
> Huh. I am surprised, but apparently this is precisely what Mail does:
> you can't Trash a message in a background window, even if you
> Command-click it.
I'm glad to see that now (on 10.9 and 10.10), as I'm almost sure it didn't do that at some point in the past. I thought I'd submitted a bug about that, but I don't see it now (could've been under a previous job's login).
> Steve writes music software. To pick an example, disabling recording on
> an active input track should NOT require a confirmation alert, even
> though it's a destructive action.
In this case, it's one of my personal apps, but "dangerous" still applies: There is a button named Search, which can perform a long search through thousands of image files. If the user had already done so, and the search took some good amount of time, and they'd scrolled through the list to select one of the resulting images, accidentally clicking the Search button while the app is in the background will cause all that time to be wasted and they'll have to wait for the search to complete again, etc.
There are also NSPathControls in my window, which also accept background clicks - it just seems careless when things happen to a background window. If a user can't tell which window is active, then perhaps it's Apple's fault for not making it more graphically apparent, not the user's fault for not understanding why they shouldn't be able to click a button that looks enabled. The fact that some controls will appear slightly different in the background when you hover over them is a step in the right direction, but human reaction speed isn't always quick enough to abort a click action that they started over a background window before they noticed that the button *slightly* changed its appearance to signal that it can be background-clicked. The toolbar buttons in Mail is a great example of this. Not everyone can easily see how that new icons in 10.10 slightly darken.
I'm going with the background disabling for my app. Ten bucks says nobody will complain about it.
--
Steve Mills
Drummer, Mac geek
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