Don’t Steal My Focus

I’m not the first to complain about this, but I won’t be the last.

There is no worse sin for an OS than to let an application take control of my focus. Nothing is quite like the exquisite torment of being in the middle of giving your program commands, and nothing happens. Perhaps another program popped up in a second window when I wasn’t looking and took focus from me. Sometimes I launch a program, then switch to a web browser and start navigating, only to have my focus is lost to a modal popup. I switch back to the web browser, continue navigating, and the same app opens another modal popup, breaking up my browsing experience yet again.

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iTunes Frustrates Me

So I fire up iTunes, and see there are 17 updates for my iOS apps. I click on the Apps sidebar option, then click on the little 17 Updates Available link in the lower right. I then click the Download All Free Updates button in the upper right. The Enter Password box pops up. I enter it, then switch back to browsing the web while it updates. I switch back to iTunes a few minutes later greeted with a Some of these apps contain age restricted material, please click OK to continue box. I click OK, switch back to browsing.

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A Place for Everything

It never fails; Every time I reinstall Microsoft Office on, I completely forget about the fact that it creates a folder called Microsoft User Data inside my Documents folder. This is just unacceptable. I sync my Documents folder to several computers, and I only want actual documents in there. After all, this folder is explicitly designed to store documents, not settings. There’s a nice little folder called Library if you want to store your application settings somewhere. Or if you’re bound and determined to ignore the OS guidelines, you can just store your settings inside your completely unnecessary /Applications/My Application folder.

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HTML Meta Tags

When I created this website, I decided that I would use custom and unique description and keywords meta for each blog post. The idea here was to make each page a bit more individual in the eyes of search engines. I realize that search engines no longer place much (if any) weight on these factors, but it doesn’t hurt to be thorough.

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What is a Web App?

Late one night, restlessly pouring over my feeds, I came across this contest. I didn’t have a handy html5 app or chrome extension to enter, but the third option required no preparatory work: Tell us how you would explain what a “web app” is to your grandmother.

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