It's a pet peeve of mine as well, in my day-to-day work in my (Be-derived) environment.. Guessing it will be the same when I eventually switch to Genode/Scultpt, then ?
I know of a couple ways to mitigate that:
1) make sure the apps lauch fast enough, that by the time you're done clicking on one launcher, the app is already open and it does not matter if you launch another one : the latter one will launch on top o fthe first one. Obviously not always easy, not even do-able, so not a general solution.
2) work like MS Windows. There's always been bad blood between me and MS-anything, but the more I use my wife's Windows 7 laptop the more I find (a few) things that don't s**k all that much, including the window focus policy : from an empty (cold) file cache, after boot-up, launching FireFox takes several seconds. If I start working on another window whilst it launches, FireFox will eventually open its window *behind* the one I'm working with. Nice. Genode could take a page from that.
In the spirit of a minimal-complexity desktop, like the window managers built on top of nitpicker, there's always a trade-off to make : do we add such and such feature, bloating the code, and risking regressions in other features ? In the case of this "focus policy", I guess the trade-off will be worth it and we'll have to convince Norman to implement it, when time comes to work on that :-)
Cedric
I hope that it is not too late to ask your community to consider very seriously the matter of stealing focus that other OS/DEs suffer from.
To be more precise, after starting my computer I choose 5 apps to get opened. While they are opening I choose the 2nd one (which opened) to work with. Now, the other 3 apps should complete start without coming forward and interrupt my work. They just appear in the task bar, either flashing, lighting or not. This feature would also be a general option, like: "Allow stealing focus: false/true".
Thanks in advance.
PS: "Always on Top" is not a SERIOUS solution at all!!! Discussing with some DE developers I was told that it is a matter of OS and not of DE. OS allows app windows to comes up.