807643 - prevent typing into alarm window

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 654726

(Calendar :: Alarms, defect)

Description

[Jérôme Bouat]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:16.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/16.0
Build ID: 20121025205329

Steps to reproduce:

When I typing text into a document is the document window focus stolen by the alarms window.


Actual results:

Sometimes it happens that I pressed the "delete" key and a task or event is deleted just because the alarms window just steal the focus.


Expected results:

One solution would be that the alarms window should ignore any key stroke when the window has the focus. Then a button could be clicked with the mouse in order to allow edition.

One other solution is to prevent stealing the focus and just "highlight" something without changing the focus (in Microsoft Windows task bar or into the Thunderbird window).

Comment 1

[Markus Adrario [:Taraman]]

For me the Reminder window does not get the focus on Lightning 2.6a1 (Win XP & Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS)
and also on Lightning 1.9.1 (Win 7 64 bit)

Comment 2

[Jérôme Bouat]

On my side, the focus is stolen when writing a new email into Thunderbird. If I'm using the "delete" key when writing the email, then a task or event is possibly deleted.

Comment 3

[Markus Adrario [:Taraman]]

With that constellation I can reproduce - except that the alarm window does not react to any other keystrokes than ESC after opening. (tested with Lightning 2.6a1 on win XP and Ubuntu linux)

So in my opinion this is annoying if you are typing an email but not a real bug.

Comment 4

[Jérôme Bouat]

Maybe a possible solution would be to show the notification inside a dock window which would appear inside the Thunderbird/Calendar window. This new dock window would possibly resize the other parts of the main window but not change the focus.

In this way, the user would see the notification when he/she is using Thunderbird/Calendar.

Comment 5

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen] [:📆][:🧩]]

I think the best solution would be to check if the user is currently doing something active with Thunderbird (maybe by checking the idle service and if any Thunderbird window is focused) and in that case just show a slider type alarm like in bug 329676. The alarm would still show up in the alarm window, but it would open in the background.

Thunderbird not focused
  => Alarm window shows up with focus
Thunderbird focused, user idle
  => Alarm window shows up with focus
Thunderbird focused, user not idle
  => Alarm window shows up in background, Slider notification

Comment 6

[Jérôme Bouat]

In reply to comment #5.

Why not using only the slider notification and don't use the popup window anymore ?

In case you check idle state, be careful to wait a duration which isn't too long (maximum 1 minute ?). Indeed the user asked to get a reminder a delay before an event or a task.

Comment 7

[M Lopez-Ibanez]

Duplicate of 654726. This not only affects Thunderbird, I might be typing on a different program and suddenly my keystrokes went to the alarm window, where they did some mess that I can hardly undo.

Comment 8

[Jérôme Bouat]

I think that bug #654726 isn't a duplicate : the alarm can steal the focus but it could only invalidate the key typing. In order to interact with the notification, you could use only the mouse or the key combination which changes the window focus (alt-tab on many desktop environments).

Comment 9

[M Lopez-Ibanez]

(In reply to Jérôme Bouat from comment #8)
> I think that bug #654726 isn't a duplicate : the alarm can steal the focus
> but it could only invalidate the key typing. In order to interact with the
> notification, you could use only the mouse or the key combination which
> changes the window focus (alt-tab on many desktop environments).

You will still lose whatever you typed. Some people look at the keyboard when typing and they may realise too late that their input has gone to the wrong window.

Note that this not only affects typing. One may be happily fast clicking away in some drawing app or game, then something comes up for a milisecond (the focus-stealing alarm reminder window), catches my mouse clicks (dismissing a few reminders forever), then goes away (because by chance I clicked in the "Dismiss All" or "close window" buttons). Ouch, what was that?

Modern desktops already provide "notifications" and Thunderbird already makes use of those for new emails.

(Not to say that perhaps only a few very specific, and configurable, keyboard shortcuts should be available in the alarm window, but even that won't solve the problem of focus-stealing).