Applications stealing focus is on of my biggest UI pet peeves. There's rarely a good reason for an application that I'm not using to interrupt what I'm doing.
Is there a way to disable focus-grabbing globally in OS X?
A:
Last time I looked (i.e. 'round about the System 7 era) the whens, whys, and wherefores of focus grabbing were specified by the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Attempting to break them would accordingly require a third party tool, and would be frowned on my most Mac users...
Screwing with such things in your own system is your business, writing programs that will do that to your users will not be popular. You have been warned.
dmckee
2009-10-09 00:48:34
A:
I can't remember the last time an application arbitrarily made itself frontmost. Prior to OS X the notification system simply put a flashing icon in your application menu and nowadays you might get a bouncing Dock item. Where are you seeing this behavior?
Azeem.Butt
2009-10-13 19:46:16
A:
The only time I've ever seen "focus stealing" was when I was launching a bunch of applications at once, but didn't want them to gain focus. I do this when I start work in the morning; I have a script that launches about 5 or 6 apps I always use.
If this is your specific case, the behavior can be suppressed in apple script.
jkyle
2010-04-06 06:02:36