The reason is that Mail thinks the mail server is unreachable, so it brings the window to front, but then magically it changes idea and the mail server is reachable again ️.
In general I find macOS handles alerting the user very poorly.
I don't know why but it infuriates me when icons bounce on the dock for attention. The animation is too insistent for whatever trivial thing the app wants to let me know.
Or an app will open some Important Dialog Box that I need to deal with, except it's hidden behind some other windows somewhere and the rest of the app refuses to respond to my clicks until I find the dialog box. It doesn't bother foregrounding the dialog box for me.
> I don't know why but it infuriates me when icons bounce on the dock for attention. The animation is too insistent for whatever trivial thing the app wants to let me know.
The animation is fine, it’s just that bad app developers abuse it for the most trivial things. I’m looking at you, Music.app and Microsoft AutoUpdate.app. (“You’re playing music elsewhere” for the former, which I am not but thanks for suggesting I’m trying to be a pirate; “I finished one part of a multi-part update and automatically continued” for the latter.)
I’m still on High Sierra (10.13) and this happened to me only three hours ago installing QCAD.
I switched out to another program for a moment during installation and when I switched back a QCAD installation dialogue box was hidden by the main QCAD installation window.
I was able to drag the obscuring window out of the way, but still seems daft not to focus on the interaction blocking window.
Yeah, that's not good. Sometimes you can find it through some combination of ensuring that app is frontmost by clicking its icon in the dock, choosing "hide others" from its menu, and triggering "show application windows" in Mission Control (often ctrl-down-arrow, or a three-finger down-swipe trackpad gesture).
Due to the explosion in videoconferencing I've spent some time recently helping family set things up via remote desktop (I highly recommend Chrome Remote Desktop by the way, pretty easy to set up). This kind of thing is absolutely inscrutable to non-tech savvy people. All they see is that the computer suddenly stops doing anything but playing an annoying "donk" sound whenever they click and they have no idea that any of those features exist.
Really, Windows with its `window == app == taskbar item` approach is far easier to understand.
Could be worse! Outlook on Windows just locks up entirely while it tries to connect. I don’t know why they’re still doing network IO in the UI thread - over 10 years after they admitted it was a major problem.
