Google Mail / Safari: Stealing focus when loading is complete is not OK

December 7, 2008 @ 16:22

I use Google Mail’s web interface for both personal ramblings with friends, and during my endless conversations with my buddies at work. This usually works just fine - the Google interface designers and engineers have produced a solid and well-designed interface for people dealing with large amounts of mail on a daily basis.

So, all is good then? No. Pose that I’ve got a web browser (in this case, Safari) open, with two tabs displaying my personal and my job’s mail interfaces respectively (both are hosted by Google). If some operation in tab one takes more time than usual to complete (I’ve bet you’ve seen this - it’s indicated with a small yellow overlay at the top of the page telling you about the progress of the operation) I usually switch over to the other tab (or any other tab, it doesn’t have to be another Google Mail interface in that newly switched to tab). So far so good.

When interacting with web pages, you often use your keyboard (to fill out forms, write comments etc.). This works just fine until the first tab decides that it is done loading - and makes Safari put focus on the first tab again. This is NOT OK. I could be in the middle of a typing operation, and once the first tab gains focus again each and every keystroke I type is sent to that tab. This could lead to all kind of “interesting” things - before realizing what has just happened, I usually manage to mute, archive and step through some mails… argh!

I’ve tried to reproduce the behavior in Firefox (version 3) without any success. Might just be Safari that’s playing tricks with me. Just wanted to let you know, and flag for help (if you know how to fix this, I’m more than eager to learn how to prevent this).

Colloquy: Breaking tabs into windows - back and forth

August 1, 2008 @ 22:49

I use Colloquy at work, a simple IRC client written in Cocoa that runs under Mac OS X 10.4 and higher. Although it has a few quirks, it works well enough for me to use it in my everyday communication with my teammates (I’m always interested in alternatives though - if you have an ace up your sleeve, please tell me so by leaving a comment).

As I’m found of tabbed user interfaces, I have setup Colloquy to show a tab for every room and private conversation I’m currently in. This works just like tabs in Safari; you can rearrange any tab by dragging it to a new position relative the other tabs, or breaking a single tab loose from the current window, letting it turn into it’s own window. So far so good… but what if you wanted to take a window with a single conversation and turn it into a tab in another window with existing tabs? Guess what - this works just in Safari too - except that every window that is created by you dragging an existing tab out of its window won’t show the tab bar by default (hence not displaying any area that will let you drag it into another window’s tab bar).

It turns out there’s an easy solution to this problem; if you ever want to take a window with a single conversation and make it a tab in another window, just tell Colloquy to show the tab bar for the current window. This is easily done through the main menu (View / Show Tab Bar), or through the designated keyboard shortcut, Command + Shift + T. Once it is displayed, just grab the tab and drag it to whatever other window you want and, tada, it turns into a tab within that window.

Not exactly rocket science, but it might help someone who accidently turned a tab into a separate window (and got stuck there, not knowing how to get it back).