Mac OS X: More on intrusiveness of background processes
Posted by Pierre Igot in: MacintoshJune 21st, 2003 • 11:20 pm
As a follow-up to my recent column on the intrusiveness of background processes in Mac OS X, I have to add another outrageous example, which was brought back to my attention by a couple of readers.
The culprit is StuffIt Expander. If your web browser or FTP client is set to post-process downloads automatically , if the download in question is a StuffIt archive, you’ll notice that, invariably, as soon as the download is complete, StuffIt Expander launches automatically and comes to the foreground, regardless of what you are doing at the time.
This is extremely annoying, because it is in blatant disregard of the fact that, for most people, downloading files off in the Internet is something that they do as a background activity, while they are doing something else on their computer. I don’t know anyone who has the patience to sit in front of their computer screen for 15 minutes or more waiting for a web download to complete, without doing anything else.
This means that, in all likelihood, at the time the download is complete, the user is actually busy doing something else — and what StuffIt Expander does is that it systematically interrupts him in what he is doing. Annoying!
Talk about user-hostile.