Evils of Popups

I'm not talking about browser popups. Most popup blockers do a great job of blocking popups. Recall that once upon a time that if you went to the "wrong" website, popup after popup would inundate you. You leave a site, and it would open a new window. Surely, that tactic wanted me to buy even more. Thank goodness for folks like Firefox and popup blockers that realized the people who used their products wanted this evilness stopped.

No, I'm referring to intentional popups. For example, I'm using Visual Studio. It, like many other applications, make judicious use of popups.

These popups are separate windows, mind you, and that's where the evilness lies.

I had my laptop spanned across a second monitor. Visual uses some evil popup because it thinks I need it out of the way. Now, let me be fair, it's not Visual, but a plug-in, called Visual Assist. I want to look for some files, it places a popup.

Now, for some reason, I had it popping up on the second monitor, meaning my application was on one monitor, my popup on another.

Once I was simply on my laptop as I am now, it still thinks the popup is on my other monitor.

EXCEPT IT ISN'T THERE!

I mean, come on! Can't you tell, before you decide to put a popup up where the monitor is? What is active?

Apparently not.

This whole mess might be avoided if the popup weren't exactly a popup, but instead, some kind of overlay on the actual window itself. Sure, it might block some stuff, but if it's well designed, it wouldn't cover anything.

That way, it wouldn't run into this bizarre situation where it thinks there's two monitors, BUT THERE ISN'T!

I realize that this is a geek complaint at its best, but I'm sure I could come up with real-world analogs.

I know, I know. As a computer person, the toughest thing is to make things easy, which ironically, is really hard, because you have to anticipate all sorts of things that you really can't anticipate because you're smart, and the people that use your stuff are really, really dumb. They'll do things you wouldn't have thought of in years and years and years.

So I'll have to live without my useful popup until I can get back to my second monitor or ask someone with Windows guruness imbued on them to solve this gnarly problem.

And now to your regularly scheduled blog reading.