Windows Woes: Window Focus Debauchery

Importance is one thing, but focus is another.

Okay, I've been sick and feeling rather unwell for over a week. Now it's time to get back into the game. And what better than to do so with a short but sweet rage post on how Windows is terrible? This time, I'm after Windows' tendency to steal window focus.

So you're typing/clicking/going about your normal business in everyone's favorite operating system then suddenly...

OH MY GOD, JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!

Okay, it may be over-exaggerating the situation just a bit, but the point is that there are some very devious things that Microsoft Windows is known to do (and versions past XP have done a bit to fix this issue). This particular issue is focus theft.

If you are typing in or otherwise using a program in Windows and one of Windows' services wants your attention, it doesn't have to scream and cry. It makes you listen to it. And it does so by using one of the worst attention grabbing mechanisms ever: not silently opening another window or service, not even blinking in the task bar to steer your eyes to the situation, but putting you in its context.

What can this lead to? If you're calmly and innocently minding your own business trying to do your work in Microsoft Word, and you just let Windows Update start its updating 10 minutes ago, well...Windows Update just finished. And it wants your attention. So it grabs it, and you accidentally hit that dreaded 'n' key. Look at the image above, and look at a single instance of the window. IF YOU HIT THAT 'N' KEY, THEN BABY, YOUR COMPUTER IS ON A ONE-WAY TRIP TO RESTART REALM. It doesn't matter if you were typing innocently in Word just mere nanoseconds ago, you hit Enter or you hit the 'n' key, you just sent a message to Windows telling it to restart now.

I swear, I have had this happen to me more times than I have fingers on my own two hands. I've been mere moments away from a restart, then quickly realized what was going on and cancelled it before Windows could enter shutdown mode. It happened today, even. It closed all of my programs and brought up the "still waiting for slow as hell services to slowly close...slowly" screen. I stopped it, but had to reopen everything I was working in. Fortunately I have Chrome and Firefox set to remember my tabs, so not too much was lost. But still!

It does it when you don't want it to, and more than just in cases of Windows Update. For example, Windows Live Movie Maker will, upon finishing its movie processing, steal the window focus from you and demand that you answer it ("Would you like to play the movie you just made?"). And this is just the icing on the spoiled cake for the equally spoiled operating system.

Please get it right, Windows. Don't steal focus, it's bad practice. And being an attention whore isn't good for your reputation.

Windows Woes: Windows Update Updates & Text Selection

The Windows operating system is and probably always will be an untamed beast of a problem.

Being a Windows user, one who spent money on a copy of Windows and use it often, I believe I have the right to complain about it. Windows Woes will be a category of posts that should be very self-explanatory. I will (usually) rant about some poor or unconventional feature of the Windows OS.

This first one is a twofer; I'll highlight two issues that just straight-up bug me this time, but usually each Windows Woes post will just contain one.

Windows Update...Update?
Windows Update. Update this, update that. Windows loves updates, and usually Microsoft releases new updates every week or so. Lots of fun with restarting and configuring your computer, and then restarting again, and then updating again, then restarting yet again, etc.

But what if you can't update, period?

This problem was amazingly unfun and stupid to fix.

If you can't update at all, what do you do? You try to fix it. I did everything I could look up and find for fixing this issue: restarting all the proper services, running the Windows Update troubleshooter (located at Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Troubleshooting\System and Security), restarted five times in total...problem still remained.

So I start trying random things. I go to change my settings for Windows Update and switch my updating to "Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them" from "Install updates automatically (recommended)" and apply the settings.

Suddenly I can use Windows Update again! My random tweaking worked, thank goodness.

But what's this?

Yeah. You read that right the first time.

What the hell? Windows Update needs an update before I can even update Windows? And to make matters worse, I have to restart my computer before I can do anything?

Oh no you don't. What an awful operating system mechanic. In Linux I don't have to restart my computer to do anything involving update manager updating (not like it matters, Linux is lightning-quick every day, all day). Why should I have to go through yet another restart/configuration sequence just to update Windows Update?! It's stupid!

Open/Save File Name Selection

This one is more hidden. It's very specific and more of an annoyance than a bad problem. You know those Open... or Save As... windows that pop up? Here's an example for context:

See that "File name:" field?

Yeah, you know what this is. You see it all the time when saving and opening files, among other things.

But you know what's annoying? If you click in the "File name:" text field, Windows automatically highlights all of the text.

I click in it once, this happens.

If I want to rename the entire document, I'll select all the text myself! I want the cursor to go to the spot I click at without highlighting anything. It's simple to select all the text in the text field anyway: Ctrl+a, Home+hold Shift+End, End+hold Shift+Home. It hardly takes any time and it isn't difficult to do.

This is especially annoying if I'm in Photoshop and I want to name a series of images the same with numbers at the end of each image's file name such as windowsisbad1.png, windowsisbad2.png, etc. I just want to save each image with a similar name, but change the number at the end. I should be able to click at the far right end of the file name, hit Backspace and then put the new number. But no. I have to click twice, once first to select all the text as Windows stupidly defaults to, and then a second time in the same spot to deselect all of the text and put the cursor at the end of the text line. And you have to wait a brief moment in between the first and second clicks, otherwise Windows will deny the latter.

Conclusion

What other conclusion is there? Windows is annoyingly full of flaws. Microsoft is lucky that I basically have to play and emulate games on Windows, otherwise I would burn every copy and remove every installation of it that I own.