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Submission details

9 +16/-7 votes

Stop the jumping dock item after a timeout

Submitted by hem.acharya on December 19, 2008 to Annoyance, Usability

I have seen dock items jumping continuously for attention until i select them. Set a timeout so that i can ignore it without opening it
similar is discussed in this blog .

http://macphobia.com/stop-making-dock-items-jump-forever.macphobia

set timeout for dock items seeking attention

Low

Low

Not fixed

Discussion (4 comments)

migueld wrote on December 19, 2008, 11:46pm

This is highly annoying to me. I think the feature is abused on OSX. I agree on the timeout; it's not necessary to annoy the user forever. For example in Mail, if it has a problem with receiving mail, it'll jump forever. It's not like your mac is going to explode if you don't react immediately, is it? :P

The one and only one scenario where that kind of infinite jumping would be justified IMO is when you are running low on hard drive space, or temperatures are too high, or the battery is about to die. The user needs to react because mac's health is at risk. That's it. For everything else, please, don't annoy users to death. It's like the tooltips on Windows, similar annoyance.

abitgone wrote on December 23, 2008, 12:49pm

But what happens if you're away from your computer for a while, and you miss the notification?

MicrowaveDave wrote on December 24, 2008, 2:02pm

I agree with hem.acharya, the constant bouncing can be very irritating. The dock already has options to turn off the bouncing animation when opening applications, instead it just flashes the triangle at the bottom. This could easily be extended to turn off bouncing animations altogether and replace them with the flashing triangle. It's very annoying when you're in the middle of a presentation and Software Update starts bouncing in the dock and doesn't stop until you click on it. The flashing triangle is still visible, but isn't so 'in your face'.

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