[perching_aix]

> annoying pop ups

Are pop-ups ever not annoying? :)

Been on mind a lot lately actually, and I basically cannot come up with a situation where popups are actually an unavoidable and proper good choice. Not from a user perspective anyways (from a dev perspective, it's an easy way out and a "good" way to attention grab... and then not hold).

[egypturnash]

I have a plugin for Illustrator that has several options for helping to make sure your file gets saved regularly. I have it configured to just pop up a polite little warning after fifteen minutes of unsaved work.

Sometimes it grabs focus from whatever I'm doing in Illustrator and this is indeed slightly annoying but it is also useful since I want it to interrupt whatever I'm doing and make me ask myself if I am at a good place to save, and if I'm not, then to save as soon as I am.

Arguably this is still annoying but it is an annoyance I have explicitly asked for, knowing it'll be annoying.

[diggan]

> Are pop-ups ever not annoying? :)

Pressing space to "preview" a file in Finder on macOS is pretty much "non-annoying popup", since you actually want it :)

[wtallis]

Consider how some developers today talk about "toast" notifications: they understand on some level that calling them pop-ups is bad, but came to a consensus that using a different name was appropriate, rather than not actually making pop-ups in the first place.

[netsharc]

Theme Hospital (a funny 90's game) had a cool way to do notifications, watch on the bottom left as icons pop up: https://youtu.be/26O35BOTVSI?t=693

Some disappear if left unclicked, I guess if the problem is no longer relevant (e.g. a patient bored of waiting leaves), and they can be attended to in any order.

[alexthehurst]

But aren’t toasts fundamentally different by being intentionally designed not to block your work?

[wtallis]

Pop-up ads from the dark ages of the web largely weren't modal dialog boxes. For the most part, clicking to dismiss them, or clicking to bring the window you cared about back to the foreground was at least as easy as getting rid of "toast" style pop-ups. Both are intentionally distracting, neither is blocking in the sense of preventing you from continuing to interact with the window they partially obscure.

[eviks]

Maybe when you repeatedly try to do an impossible action and don't understand more subtle UI cues? The the popup would be correctly interfering to explain the frustration of the repeated fails?

[ponector]

>> I basically cannot come up with a situation where popups are actually an unavoidable and proper good choice

How about pop-up with 2fa request? Better to have pop-up for push notification than to look for auth app by yourself.

[IChrisI]

"Are you sure you want to close 146 tabs?"

[Timwi]

This is a great example of an unnecessary pop-up. There should just be an obvious way to undo it.

[msephton]

There is, but not everybody will know how to find it. Whereas everybody will see the warning alert.

Personally, I wouldn't call this a popup because this was a result of a user action.