I've posted before about UI issues in various programs, so I thought I'd share what I'm experiencing (suffering through) right now. I was visiting Mike Chamber's blog and figured I'd finally install his DevChat central app. I clicked the link, and everything was going nicely until.... the install process just stopped.

This brings up two interesting bugs. One I can forgive, one is almost funny that it was forgotten.

First - there is no cancel button during the install. What if you are on a dialup modem and the line goes dead? What if it's taking too long and you just change your mind?

Second - focus. I loathe applications that sit in front of all other windows. In theory tweakui and other applications allow you to turn that off, but it doesn't work completely. Right now I've got a "Central means Central Dev Chat" window, right in the middle of my screen, that cannot be sent away. It should be a law that all IDEs, when encountering a line of code that will set a window to the top and keep it there, should pop open a warning, "Are you sure you want to annoy your users? Are you sure your application is really the most important one running on the user's box? Are you sure you know whats best??" To be fair, Mozilla suffers from this as well, as do many other applications.

Well, I guess it's off to the task manager to kill the process.