You know the feeling. Monday morning. You come in to the office to find that the cleaning lady has switched off your desktop PC, that the server has decided to throw a fit, or that shit has generally caught on fire in the 48 hours that you were out drinking the pain away.
What do you do? You turn on the coffee maker and start logging back in. Now of course, your employer has decided that this new-fangled security thing is worth trying out, and he has implemented a policy of having passwords for everything. Application developers have in turn responded by having password input dialogs not unlike this one:
Password input box
Now as you may well be aware, these bastards pop up something bad! You click your e-mail icon and start typing away, happily updating your Facebook status in your browser window while this monstrosity of an e-mail client loads your five years of e-mails from the IMAP server, and blam! Password please, where of course now you have answered something along the lines of "ith her mom instead!!" and you have to wait the obligatory three seconds between attempts. Or perhaps even worse; your Facebook status ends up as "I ditched her and went out wi3@Nk)lo02f" because the window pops up over whatever it was you were doing, but the focus did not get shifted!
Of course these come in varying degrees of suck. As jubbink pointed out, some of the dialogs pull you in to a trap. Others just merely steal your focus and make you speak nonsense on Facebook and reset your password before you've had your Monday-morning coffee. They should all DIAF.
To give you an idea of how wide-spread of a nuisance this really is, here's a scientific comparison using the Googles:
That's right. Stealing focus sucks an order of magnitude more than Sasha Gray and Jenna Jameson combined! I even gave it a handicap in this expirement.
If only application developers would figure this out, maybe we'd spend less time on changing passwords and more time on uh, entertainment.
