RE: "Always on Top" Keyholes

I strongly agree that the Task Manager has the wrong default. AOT should
be an option, not the default. This always bugs me because in my job I
have to use the Task Manager a lot.

Any dialog, whether modal or modeless can be AOT. AOT is orthogonal to
modality. Help files are almost always modeless (it would be a crime
against humanity to make them modal), but it is obnoxious when they're
AOT. How dare the developers be so presumptuous, as if they're the most
important app in the world.
=20
FrankParis
Software Engineer
DSG-MSG: Inventor Core
Autodesk, Inc.
7995 SW Mohawk
Tualatin, OR 97062
503-692-8384
-----Original Message-----
From: software-keyholes-bounces-xIg/pKzrS18HpDbxM/[email protected]
[mailto:software-keyholes-bounces-xIg/pKzrS18HpDbxM/[email protected]] On Behalf Of Scott
Meyers
Sent: Saturday, September 10, 2005 9:27 PM
To: software-keyholes-xIg/pKzrS18HpDbxM/[email protected]
Subject: [SK] "Always on Top" Keyholes

As I was moving an "always on top" window around my screen the other
day,
trying to see what was underneath it, I realized that I'd identified an
"Alway on Top" (AOT) keyhole.  However, the program I was using (Windows
Task Manager) has a setting that controls whether the window is always
on
top, so it's not really a keyhole.  (If users can make the keyhole go
away,
it might be bad default behavior, but it's not a keyhole.)

My copy of ACDSee 5 has an AOT Keyhole in its help system, in that the
help
window insists on being on top of all other ACDSee 5 windows, but
windows
for other applications may be on top of all ACDSee 5 windows, so this is
an
intra-application AOT keyhole.  Does anybody know of an
intra-application
AOT keyhole, i.e., an application that forces a window to be on top of
all
other windows, including those from other applications, and where users
cannot disable this behavior?

There is some kind of relationship between AOT keyholes and modal dialog
keyholes, but I'm not sure what it is.  Perhaps a modal dialog is just a
common manifetation of an AOT keyhole.  Comments?

Thanks,

Scott

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