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You can't close apps on the Mac either (you can, but it is only for experts). I guess no uninstalling is just the logical extension of that concept.
by Tichy 16y ago
You can't close apps on the Mac either (you can, but it is only for experts). I guess no uninstalling is just the logical extension of that concept.
- generalk 16y agoI don't follow. Command+Q and AppNameMenu->Quit both disagree with you.
- statictype 16y agoYou're right. But at the same time I wonder how many users understand the distinction. You can get 'rid' of a window by either hitting the red x (which I presume is the same as Ctrl-W), Alt-Clicking the dock icon (which I presume is the same as Ctrl-H) or going to Menu->Quit (Ctrl-Q). It's easy to understand this, once you realize that window management is app-centric and is organized by Application rather than individual windows but that's a subtle distinction most normal users will not understand on their own. To compound things, for some apps,closing the window will actually quit the app. And for some, closing the window leaves the app still running in the dock but clicking the dock icon doesn't bring up.
- steveklabnik 16y agoI know that an appeal to tradition isn't exactly the most persuasive of arguments, but the core Mac fanbase has been doing things this way for decades. I happen to like it a lot more. Those few inconsistencies suck, though. Bad apps, what are you going to do? Well, you could reject them from a store...
- Tichy 16y agoHave you tried to explain that to your mum?
- count 16y agoDoes it make a difference?
- Tichy 16y agoYes, because my claim was that closing apps is for experts only, just as uninstalling apps.
- Tycho 16y agoBut users can still see that an app is open because of its dock icon indicator, and also when they close the window, the application's menu is still visible in the menubar until they enter another app. So that helps.
- philwelch 16y agoMy mother grasped the idea pretty easily, actually, but then again she always used Macs. If it wasn't for Windows confusing people by conflating windows with applications, I suspect most people's mothers wouldn't have a problem with it.
- chc 16y agoAs a lab instructor at a community college, I explained this to hundreds of people. None had much trouble with it.
- stcredzero 16y agoActually, that's a pretty clever optimization for caching, IMO. The user tends to leave apps in memory, leading to much snappier performance on machines with sufficient RAM. EDIT: And if you're savvy, you can always manage memory manually and quit from the top menu or from the Dock.
- jncraton 16y agoIf the OS is intelligent, the memory doesn't get overwritten until it is needed. Even if an app is completely closed and its process is killed, doesn't it's image still hang around in memory for the next time it is run?
- thwarted 16y agoThe binary and libraries and accessed (and perhaps saved) files should still be in whatever buffers/cache the operating system maintains in the unused portion of RAM, but the state of the application is gone (unless the application saved its state and will restore it upon starting up again, of course).
- glhaynes 16y agoAnd it appears Lion is going to bring some help to devs on doing just that (saving/restoring state).
- Tichy 16y agoAnd the local disk is just a cache for the cloud. So installed apps are just cached files from the cloud. Hence my analogy holds.