Hacker News Reader

Comment by mihaaly | Hacker News Reader

I confirm your observations.

Yet, to force an app to the front when glitch in connection happens is more like a feature they deliriously thought is being useful, instead of choosing other means of notifications, which is plenty. An app is not forcing itself to the front without someone is specifically writing the code for it to do.

View on HN

This smells like a feature built 10+ years ago, before notifications existed in Mac OS X, that never got upgraded.

That's how apps "notified" back then.

> That's how apps "notified" back then.

Polite apps would just bounce their dock icon rather than stealing focus, however.

Exactly. I found the bouncing animation genius, as it always reminded me of a toddler impatiently jumping up and down for attention. Doesn't mail.app do this?

> mail.app

Mail.app and most other apps since 10.8 (?) introduced badges just use those, unless it’s a more urgent thing than “you have a new message” in which case, yes, it will bounce the dock icon.

I wrote a SIMBL plugin at one point to neuter applications that did this too much (actually, I forked it from someone who wrote it for Spotify). Trying to grab my attention in a persistent, repetitive way for something that is minor drives me up the wall.

Also known as “Bouncing in the dock like a Jack Russell fucking Terrier” [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/ks-N4rI_1RU

Before the native notification system, there was this Growl thing that literally every single third-party app used. Apple apps, on the other hand...

I still miss Growl having logging history. Once in a while I need to check back on something.

I vaguely remember it having history, but the native system does have something similar in that panel you get by swiping with two fingers from the right edge of the trackpad, in "notifications" tab.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com