There is one annoying behaviour of Parallels Desktop for Mac which I would appreciate you to change. On Mac OS X it is NOT the common behaviour and it it NOT much appreciated by real Mac OS X users that an application take the keyboard focus away from what he/she is doing.
The right behaviour for an application is to never grab the focus out of the hands of the user and to never display new windows over the one currently active, if the application is not the currently focused one (the one whose menu is displayed).
Parallels Desktop for Mac does this since the beginning and it is especially annoying when starting or stopping a virtual machine or Parallels application itself.
If I click to start a virtual machine then turn to check my email or read a web page (for instance), then sooner or later, while I'm right typing an email, the vm windows will appear on top of what I'm doing and will grab the keyboard focus, distracting me from what I'm doing. This is NOT the Mac way of doing things. This is the Windows way of doing things and it is not a nice thing. If the application would like to get the attention of the user, the right thing to do is to animate appropriately the dock icon. New windows can appear of course, but not over those of the current application. And the keyboard focus should be left where it is: in the controlling hands of the user.
You really should change that for the very next update, be it minor or major.
Update: It looks like build 4560 doesn't grab focus anymore. At least it looks I can not reproduce it, for now. Good news !!!
Update 2: I still has this annoying behaviour when shutting down my Windows XP VM. I click Start - Shutdown and then while windows is stopping I switch to other tasks on OS X. All of a sudden when // VM changes resolution and switch to its VM settings display, it grabs the focus, disturbing whatever I'm doing instead of just doing its stuff 'behind'. I don't mind seeing it, I mind seeing it take the center stage and the keyboard without me asking for. ;-) Please fix this for a next release!
Thank you very much,
Last edited: Jul 24, 2007
