How to prevent applications from stealing focus ?

[icymountain]

I am searching how to prevent applications from stealing focus in Mac OS X, typically to display error messages that I do not care about:

Example 1: on my laptops, iTunes complains about authentication problems whenever I wake the computer from sleep with iTunes already running, and when it was running before I put the computer to sleep, in a place where I had network (I use it *only* to listen to Music, and do not need iTunes to phone home anyway)

Example 2: I use a VPN program in the background, and do not need it to report it cannot connect whenever the wireless drops (often).

There are other such annoying quirks, that make the user experience worse than it should be.

 

[icymountain]

Nobody else is having the same issue ?

I did not find any general solution for this problem (just some app specific solutions), but would really like to get rid of this focus stealing thing.

 

[0d085d]

I did not find any general solution for this problem (just some app specific solutions), but would really like to get rid of this focus stealing thing.

Have you tried this? http://www.cnet.com/news/keep-applications-from-stealing-focus-when-opening-in-os-x/

1. Locate the application package file for the program in question.
   
   
2. Right-click and choose "Show Package Contents."
   
   
3. Navigate to the "Contents" directory within the application and open the "Info.plist" file in a text editor.
   
   
4. Add the following lines to the file (the easiest location is to place them immediately after the <dict> tag, before the first <key> tag at the top of the document):
   
   <key>LSBackgroundOnly</key>
   <string>True</string>
   
   
5. Save and close the file, and close the application package windows