Don't steal focus during Maya startup

[laurence.cymet]

Maya can take a little while to start up, especially when you have multiple plug-ins enabled.  During this period Maya steal UI focus several times (particularly on windows) which is frustrating as it prevents you from doing something else while waiting for Maya to start up.  

It would be great if Maya didn't steal focus at all, so I can work on some other app during startup. 

[userX4542]

Hey Laurence. Do you know why maya takes so long to start up? Wouldn't it be better to speed that up or is that not a realistic option?

[laurence.cymet]

Hey Callum,  Much of Maya's startup time is dependent on which plugins you have loaded. This is definitely an area that could be improved but the experience will be different for everyone, and in some cases it is a 3rd party or custom plugin that can add to the startup time. So it would be more of a "small cuts" kind of improvement.    

Please log an idea though - as there are things that could be done, and in the meantime try disabling all the plugins you don't use on a daily basis and see if it improves.  Thanks!

[userX4542]

Okay that makes sense. Yes it's difficult balance because most plug-ins are used frequently and keeping track of which ones are loaded and which ones aren't can cause some confusion. For example, we recenlty had a problem loading exr's and we joked that perhaps we had to load an 'exr plug-in'. Until we realised....we did need to load the exr plug-in. Bit crazy..

But what you're saying is very true. I hope all aspects of startup could be improved, including stealing focus.

[laurence.cymet]

Merging similar Idea from @Anonymous: Maya 2018 takes ~1 minute to start, and during that time I do other stuff. Three or four times towards the end of startup, I suddenly find that I'm typing in the Maya window. It also does it while loading a new scene. (3DS Max is far worse, FWIW.) It should pop up a splash screen, then everything else should be at the same level as that. If I click away from the splash screen, nothing else should come to the front until I click on it again. I know it's not only a Windows app, but still, this is from the Windows application guidelines: "Windows displayed by user-initiated actions should take input focus, but only if the window is rendered immediately (within 5 seconds). Once the window is rendered, it can take input focus once. If a window renders slowly (more than 5 seconds), users are likely to perform another task while they wait. Taking focus at this point would be an annoyance, especially if done more than once."

[Anonymous]

Would just like to add my 2 cents here because recently Maya has started to steal focus when opening a new file via script command, pmc.openFile(). This recently started happening, is there a preferences setting for this?

[NateLikesTea]

Any updates on this?  It's super frustrating, especially when using multiple virtual desktops.  Any stopgaps or workarounds?

[zapan669]

Same here,  it also happens with Maya Batch.

Basically running 10 Maya batch  will steal Focus 10 times .....

[ferdinand.gleinser]

+1

This has been very annoying, especially when you open multiple instances of Maya to check different files while in a zoom meeting doing a presentation.

I'd even propose Maya doesn't come to the foreground at all during startup

[alex_bannerman]

Great! I just posted another request for this without realising it has been discussed. Cheers guys

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/maya-programming/maya-starup-overrides-display/m-p/9926554#M12817

[maxim.2000XMP66]

Please, this feature is needed!

Especially when you have a bugged file (which sadly happens too often with maya), that fatal errors, reloading the file just takes so much time, and while doing it, you cant even google for the problem because Maya constantly steals the focus.

It is hugely annoying to me, please find a solution @Anonymous!

[trevor.adams]

Solved.

We redesigned the Maya startup experience in Maya 2022.

Gone are the days when Maya shows you the UI, makes you think it's ready but it's not ... and then switches focus constantly back to itself as you try to multi-task while Maya finishes its long loading process. We fixed this. This is the new startup experience:

• Show Maya's splash screen as soon as possible (don't wait for licensing validation)
• Don't open the Output window on startup
• Show license validation progress
• Show overall progress in splash screen (progress bar shows which plug-ins are loading, instead of loading them while Maya's UI becomes available ... to which some plug-ins can alter the UI in the process and cause UX issues)
• When the user switches focus, don't ever pull it back - wait for the user to put the focus back on Maya
• Hide the splash screen and show the fully-built Maya UI only when Maya is idle and 100% ready for input

Oh, and the startup is now much faster, after we've cleaned up Maya's starter scripts, removing a load of lines of code, and optimized the startup code.

Check out what's new in Maya 2022 by watching this highlight video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyPkTeJ9vJ8) or by reviewing the What's New section in the latest docs (https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2022/ENU/?guid=GUID-57F72C64-401A-4273-9B16-23FF57C46605). Thanks for your patience in waiting for us to improve the startup experience. Maya should now allow you to get to work faster.