What is with these applications stealing my focus?

| Nov 16, 2011 min read

I work. I work a lot. I work to ridiculous values of lot. Because I work constantly and without rest I’m always talking to people on Skype instead of in person. When I’m speaking to someone on Skype I want to pretend that this person has my undivided attention.

Today, like any other day; I opened Adobe Photoshop to check a comp for a web implementation detail. Photoshop is a fucking memory hog of an application and usually stalls my computer out for a couple of seconds while it’s loading so this is generally a great time to flip over to Skype and check updates in any of the various groups or channels I’m participating in (a decidedly less memory-intensive task.)

Why is it, in 2011, after at least 11 years of seriously powerful fucking multitasking-capable operating systems; does this fucking behemoth of an application insist on taking the focus away from what I clearly decided was more important – and shift my input carat to itself? Why does it do this even if there’s no shitty alert dialog telling me that it needs to update fonts in order to show me the current document that’s loaded? Why does it do it at all? It should just open IN THE BACKGROUND! WHERE I PUT IT!

If you’re the guy in charge of Adobe’s user experience team and you have anything to do with Photoshop; please do the world a favor and go downstairs right now into your kitchen, open the cupboard under the sink. Take a 20oz. “Budweiser” painted glass out of your cabinet; fill it with bleach and drink the mother-fucker. You obviously don’t want your job.

Thanks for taking the desktop equivalent of a piss, in my face; every time I interact with your brand.