Interactive popups should not interrupt what the user is doing

[Jonathan Alfonso]

Hi, I found a rather annoying UX bug that affects virtually every operating system, and it's potentially catastrophic: the interactive popup. In my personal instance, Slingshot crashed in the background and I was not aware, which caused a prompt to appear in front of the terminal I was typing in. I hit space, and suddenly, I'm confirming a dialog that I did not even know what it was spawned by. Luckily, it was just a bug report and space wasn't harmful, but there can be potentially unwanted results by forcing a popup to be in the foreground:

Situation A:
User is installing software, switches over to app, then accidentally confirms the authentication dialog without typing password by being interrupted, followed by a "wrong password" prompt.

Situation B:
User is typing a document, and something in the background crashes, causing an annoying popup to take control of the foreground, both interrupting the typing and potentially making unwanted/unknown changes

Situation C:
User is doing an activity, and a prompt asks for something, such as save and quit or quit. The user, who was typing, accidentally "presses" quit without saving by using their keyboard's space bar, as they got interrupted.

Potential solution:
I thought of a solution to this problem. Rather than dialogs forcing their way to the foreground, it would be a better idea for them to simply make a notification that they require attention, which would cause Plank's indicator to glow red. That's a pretty good indicator of "Hey, this needs your attention!" without interrupting what you're doing, and the system is already implemented.