Garo Garabedyan- a private blog

Have you sometimes started writing some long text, and suddenly the computer pop-ups window explaining something. You continue typing because you don’t look at the screen but on the keyboard. So going this way of entering text nowhere you press space or enter and then the default button of the pop-upped window is activated and the window disappears. At most of the time you can’t understand what happened.

Is it proper the operating system to warn you when you are typing nowhere? It is technologically possible, it only have to find that receives symbols which are not captures by any running program. This way it can warn you and possibly prevent you to not press enter/ space and choose the default option of something pop-upped.

Some things to be done:

• when application (active at the moment) receives symbols (commands from the keyboard) which are not commands on which it can react, the application should pass this commands to the operating system
• operating system when receives commands from the keyboard first have to check are they commands on which it can react, and if not (and if there are running 2 or more than 2 GUI windows, which are not minimized by the user) to alarm the user

Operating systems capture the input of text and tries to focus the file/ folder which starts with the entered text (in Windows only the first character of the file/ folder name). When the entered text doesn’t refer to any file and the user continues typing text by pressing some character (and the wrong characters’ count become 2) then is proper to alarm the user.

Other possible idea is to not let windows to pop-up before you have finished typing (a time constant have to elapse before you get the new window pop-up) by minimizing the pop-upped windows and even when a new window pop-ups to have a second time constant keeping the window inactive (to not click with the mouse and this time to see the po-up window and your click to affect the pop-up).