GOMF for Win7/64?
August 29, 2010 11:46 PM   Subscribe

I need a "get out of my face" app for Win7/64.

Way back a long time ago, when my computer was an Amiga, one of the system programmers at Commodore wrote a little app she called GOMF, which stood for Get Out of My Face. She released it to the user base for free, to much acclaim.

What it did was to push "yeah, I know about it, now shut up" buttons on various unnecessary alarm popups. You could control which ones it automatically dismissed. It was really nice, for there were really a swarm of unwanted and unnecessary alert popups in AmigaDOS.

Windows doesn't give anything away to the Amiga in that regard, and it's only gotten worse. I have an equivalent app for Windows called RTVReco that hooks something involved in bringing up popups, and can be programmed to recognize some of them and to push a button automatically. Like "Yes, I really do want to quit this app without saving my data. STFU already."

But it was written for Windows 95. And the hobbyist that created it has long since vanished, taking the nominal home page for the app with him. And it hasn't been updated since about 1999.

A lot's changed since then, and it doesn't catch all the popups. I'd like an app which was written more recently, that works better, under Win7/64. It would be awesome if it was free, but I'm willing to pay a reasonable amount ($20 or less) for something if it works well.

Can anyone recommend such a thing for me?
posted by Chocolate Pickle to Computers & Internet (9 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Can you give an example of what you mean in terms of unnecessary alarm popups in Windows? I mainly use OSX, but do use Windows 7 and I don't recall ever thinking "God, so many damn alerts, if only I had an app to stop all this."
posted by Biru at 11:56 PM on August 29, 2010


I also mainly use OSX, with the occasional bootcamp-ing in Windows 7 for my games. I can guess what he means by 'unnecessary alarm popups', stuffs like:

* notification (nag) to restart after automatic windows update
* security updates for no firewall, no anti-virus, no backup
* when shutting down computer, waiting for a program to close

and those are just what I could recall from memory. I did think about "God, so many damn alerts" but unfortunately I think there's no app to stop all these ...
posted by joewandy at 12:18 AM on August 30, 2010


If I needed to do this I'd probably start with AutoHotKey, but I don't know if there's an existing popup-killer AHK script you could build on or if you'd have to write your own.
posted by Lazlo at 12:30 AM on August 30, 2010 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Haven't tried it personally, but something like DialogDevil might be up your alley.

There is probably a bundle of registry fixes out there to get rid of the most obvious annoyances, but I wasn't able to find one with a quick google.
posted by benzenedream at 12:58 AM on August 30, 2010


Response by poster: The most common annoying popup is the one that virtually every program pops up when I try to shut them down that says, "You have unsaved data. Do you want to save it now?" (I think there's a Microsoft UI guideline requiring that.)

Some programs pop up when you try to shut them down just to ask if you really mean to do it.

Generally speaking, the ones I find the most annoying can all be paraphrased, "Are you sure?"

Another thing is when freeware versions of programs pop up and nag me to purchase the full version.

Thank you, benzenedream, it looks like DialogDevil is exactly what I was looking for.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:03 AM on August 30, 2010


Seconding Lazlo. DialogDevil costs $24.95. AutoHotKey is free and with a tiny bit of programming you can get it to automatically push buttons for you and do a huge amount of other stuff. I add a couple of lines to my master configuration everytime I have a dialog that I have to do the same things to over and over (like cancel them, for example). Here's a snippet showing a couple of things I've automated which could help get you started:

---
;Autoclose Windows Updates "have to restart" box
IfWinExist, Automatic Updates
{
WinActivate
Send !l
}
;Autoclose Windows 7 Updates "have to restart" box
IfWinExist, Windows Update
{
WinActivate
Send !p
}

---
posted by tra at 12:40 PM on August 30, 2010


You can also do it like this:
;Autoclose Windows Updates "you need to restart" box
IfWinExist, Windows Update
{
WinActivate
ControlClick, Postpone
}

posted by tra at 11:48 PM on August 30, 2010


Response by poster: DialogDevil was just what I was looking for. One example: the 64-bit version of MplayerC complained on every file it started showing that it could not find an obsolete version of D3D. RTVReco couldn't find that popup to cancel it, but DialogDevil killed it instantly. Thank you again, BenzeneDream.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:56 PM on August 30, 2010


Response by poster: ...and I didn't have to muck around with scripting. I dragged an icon from the DialogDevil window onto the "OK" button on MPC-HC64's popup, and that was all I had to do.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:58 PM on August 30, 2010


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