Re: OS X apps now really Quit when requested to Quit??

Paul Sture wrote:
Mr. Uh Clem wrote:
Based on above responses, I guess I've usually just used the
red button at the upper left, which closed the window and as
pointed out, that does not quit the app when the last one is
closed. Lately, I've used cmd-Q much more. I'm stunned that
it took me a couple years to catch on to this.


I've found that some applications _do_ quit when the last window is
closed via the red button at the upper left (or cmd-w), but other don't.

This is one of the hallmarks of document based apps. However, one is free to make apps that are not document based that one might expect to exit when you close the last active window. That is, not all OS X apps should be expected to behave like a doc-based app when it does not make sense. Apple provides usability guidelines for both sorts of applications.

I'm usually fine with that, except for the case of cross-platform apps (i.e., Java apps) where the standard Windows paradigm is supported: closing the window closes the app. In these cases I've had to remember that I really mean "hide".

Of course, there are poorly written apps everywhere. Real cross-platform usability can be a hard nut to crack.

A recent challenge for our app was that Windows users do not expect long-running clients to persist when they close the window. We've had to place an icon in the taskbar to notify Windows users that we are still active, with a user-settable property that controls just what the "close window" button does to our document-based view (i.e., if you want to kill the app with that button, we allow you to, but it is not the default). Unix users (we do not have an OS X client) have no problem with the notion of a long-running client.
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