11 ms·

That’s it, we’re quitting

138 points by marcog1 16y ago

bmelton 16y ago
I'm certainly impressed that the Canonical team are thinking about UI issues in this much depth. It is admittedly FAR more thought than I've ever given to the 'Quit' command, ever. And while my initial thought is that there are much more important UI/UX issues to be solved in Ubuntu before this, I think that thinking of things like this are key in fixing the global UI altogether. I'm not entirely certain of whether or not this is the best suggestion though. I LIKE to quit applications. I like knowing that they aren't running in the background, that they aren't consuming resources, that they aren't going to pop up a notification, that they aren't cluttering up my taskbar. I'm the same way with browser tabs -- I don't like having any more open than I need. If I'm in the middle of something, and need to have a lot of tabs open, I'll generally open a new browser for my casual browsing that I can close when I'm finished. Conversely, I almost always keep Photoshop open, even if it's idle, because launching it takes more than a couple of seconds. I don't know if getting rid of quit is exactly what I'm looking for.
- DanI-S 16y ago
  I feel the same way as you do - I like to feel my system is clean and uncluttered. However, I still agree with their thoughts. We may like quitting applications, but realistically, memory/CPU management is something that can and should be handled by the OS. It's an overhead on the user's mind that can be dealt with perfectly well by clever automation. It should keep itself clean without needing our help. A kid growing up in a world without the 'quit' button would not feel anything is missing; we've just been conditioned by the creaky operating systems of our own youth.
  - bmelton 16y ago
    I don't necessarily disagree. Most of my complaints are systems of the existing broken paradigm. That my taskbar is cluttered up could easily be fixed with their suggestions, and a part of their remedy might even be to get rid of the taskbar altogether. The proof is in the putting, and with conceptual changes like this, I'm leery of judging before I see the actual results. For the most part, backgrounded running applications don't take up resources unless they're supposed to (like music playing, or an uptime monitor, etc.) so I don't have any qualms about leaving that to the OS (unless they screw it up,) but all the other visual aspects need to be dealt with at the same time for this to be effective.
  - scott_s 16y ago
    I quit applications because open applications leave UI remnants laying around. If they can figure out a way to do the Right Thing with the UI, then it wouldn't bother me.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
joaquin_win 16y ago
It seems to be down, google cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KY4Mjyl8z1cJ:design.canonical.com/2011/03/quit/+site:http://design.canonical.com/2011/03/quit/&hl=en&gl=ca&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KY4Mjyl...
- jontas 16y ago
  I thought the down website was related to the headline..
  - zephjc 16y ago
    "That's it, we're quitting. Sincerely, The Canonical database servers"
aeden 16y ago
Looks like their server feels the same way. (Sorry, I had to say it)
- silentbicycle 16y ago
  No, you really didn't. Comments like this add nothing to the discussion. Couldn't you have at least linked to the google cache? http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KY4Mjyl8z1cJ:design.canonical.com/2011/03/quit/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KY4Mjyl...
  - aeden 16y ago
    Someone else had already linked to the google cache, but thanks for playing.
gm 16y ago
This argument is pointless. The argument makes no sense without putting in the context of content creation vs content consumption. Content creation is very resource incentive. If you don't quit any apps ever, you run out of resources. Simple as that. Content consumption, on the other hand is easy and very optimized. Always have your browser running with 10 pages loaded at the same time you have your music player running and have a movie paused. No problem. Never quit anything. Then the argument starts to make some sense.
- alextp 16y ago
  It's not about never quitting, though. It's about quitting when you close the last document, or something similar, and breaking the distinction between closing and quitting. Heavy-duty apps should quit in the background after you close what you were working on, but this shouldn't necessarily matter to the user.
  - zacharypinter 16y ago
    Right, or go into some sort of tombstoned mode when resources are needed and the app hasn't been in the foreground for a while.
extension 16y ago
Awesome. Next, get rid of "Save", which is an even bigger problem.
- robryan 16y ago
  Makes a lot of sense, if you kept a transparent source control of every change made to something and constantly updated it on each change. The issue though is how everyone is used to save. I guess a regular save can be the same idea as a tag in version control with the automated stuff to, I think the next OSX was doing something like this?
  - gwern 16y ago
    > Makes a lot of sense, if you kept a transparent source control of every change made to something and constantly updated it on each change. The issue though is how everyone is used to save. True enough, but they're also getting used to transparent saving. You don't 'save' your state in Gmail; if Firefox or your computer crashes, you didn't 'save' the current tab state. And so on. The state is just there and always up-to-date. If you look, you can see how they are saving in the background every X seconds (such as Gmail's composition warning), but I imagine most people simply gloss over that.
- zoul 16y ago
  http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/ http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/ “Say good-bye to manual saving. Auto Save in Mac OS X Lion automatically saves your work — while you work — so you don’t have to. Lion saves changes in the working document instead of creating additional copies, making the best use of available disk space. The lock feature prevents inadvertent changes from being saved and automatically locks documents after two weeks. And the revert feature returns you to the state the document was in when you last opened it, so you can feel free to experiment with confidence.” Makes perfect sense to me.
  - GHFigs 16y ago
    The remarkable thing is that for thirty years we've been using tools that default to destroying your work. I can't think of a better example of our collective tolerance for janky technology than the persistence of such a glaring regression from the typewriters (etc) that personal computers replaced.
vytis 16y ago
I guess the next one in line should be getting rid of file as a concept. Not much point knowing where exactly the song you want to listen or a movie you want to play is stored.
- extension 16y ago
  Depends what you mean by "where". With respect to finding it amongst other files, making it available on portable devices, sharing it (or NOT sharing it) with others, "where" is very important to the user. What we really want is the user's concept of a file decoupled from the system's concept, and then cleansed of various baggage from the prior coupling. That's very different than making it a system concept exclusively.
  - vytis 16y ago
    I meant from a user's perspective. You shouldn't care if the song is stored in /foo/bar or in a remote database somewhere in the cloud. You access it through some obvious interface e.g. iTunes. Having 'file' as a central concept of accessing data doesn't have much connection to the actual way it is used. My vim config file doesn't have much in common with a song I've just downloaded. It is stored the same way, but that's about it.
    - extension 16y ago
      Most aspects of the file concept are indispensable to the user. A generic data container is what allows us to have standardized document formats not coupled to applications or platforms and generalized organizing, packaging, sharing, storage, and search. These are user concepts that can't be abstracted away without sacrificing enormous amounts of utility. The aspects that the user can do without are related to sharing the file system with software that uses it as a backend store.
mycroftiv 16y ago
I get so frustrated reading blog posts by user interface designers. They almost invariably consist of reasoning I disagree and conclusions I disagree with in support of user interface decisions that make my experience as a user worse. Ubuntu Unity is pretty much an anthology of user interface decisions that are exactly wrong by my perception, and "lets get rid of quit" is just another one. Of all the actions in any menu ever, "quit" is one of the few that I thought confused no one. Then I read something like: "in Ubuntu, we have some elements waiting to help out: the messaging menu, the me menu, and the sound menu" and discover the concept is stuffing functionality into a maze of predetermined slots based on a set of usage assumptions. I don't think any of this is responding to the needs of users, I think its the equivalent of rearranging the furniture in the middle of the night so people trip over the couch when they are walking to the bathroom.
- gregschlom 16y ago
  Now I know what I'll be doing at 3am tonight.
- ams6110 16y ago
  rearranging the furniture in the middle of the night so people trip over the couch when they are walking to the bathroom Exactly how I felt about the "new" Microsoft Office UI and the straw that broke the camels back on my continued use of that software.
  - raintrees 16y ago
    It would seem that existing users' knowledge of menu/button layout was sacrificed for new users' organizational benefits. From a "never having used Office before" point of view, it is more logical now. From my power user's point of view, the first 30 hours of usage had an additional 5-10 hours (wag) of "okay, where would they have moved THAT feature to?"
  - run4yourlives 16y ago
    It's funny, because from my perspective as a casual office user, I actually thought the menus made things a little easier to use, even if I needed to "re-learn" where things were. My wife however, much more of a "power" office user, has completely sworn off of them. This is a person that knew pretty much where every menu item on word and excel was by memory. Her experience has been destroyed, so much that I needed to re-install 2003 on all the machines that she would use. Most certainly tripping on couches.
hsmyers 16y ago
I'm sorry, I just don't see where the problem is. To take two applications that I run almost continuously, an editor and a browser, both have multiple instances of task--- both shown to me as windows as it happens. No problem in either opening or closing them. The mechanism is as old as windowed operating systems; find the menu item that says close or click in the corner (or it's analogue.) This action scales; do the same thing if I wish to close the app (although as was pointed out in passing in the article, this action is decreasing.) Is there anyone reading this that is confused over these actions? I really don't think so. Instead of the disparaging remark about cargo-cult interface design, maybe it was a case of the designers understanding that there are some wheels that need to be shared and not re-invented. Given the time these methods have been in place and in use, it doesn't seem like a good thing to change without a much more compelling argument.
- johkra 16y ago
  Many applications have both a "close" and a "quit" option. The "close" option does what you describe - they want to get rid of the "quit" option, which is used to quit an application. (Try opening two Firefox windows and you can easily see the difference.)
lukeschlather 16y ago
Getting rid of quit/close requires the user to learn entirely new metaphors every time they use a program in order to know how to get a program to stop taking up resources. In a system with effectively limitless resources this is fine, but in lower specced systems, not so much. Also "effectively limitless" means equivalent to the specs of the worst system the designers use, which will likely skew things. Where I'm sitting we share 384K down / 128K up between about 40 people. Updaters that refuse to stop downloading when you close them really bog down the network. Now, you could try and put in some custom menu to control that sort of thing, but that's going to be a mess of configuration and hard choices, and developers will have to do that for every single app. Quit/Close are two well-defined commands that give the user a well defined way to say when they want something to go away vs. when they want something to go away and quit doing anything. Re-implementing "go away and quit working" on a case-by-case basis is going to end up with every app either having a nonstandard interface for doing so, or no way to do so at all (like most update managers.) Personally, I think "some apps don't quit properly" is a description of a problem with the apps, not with the "quit" command. Comparing to mobile is a red herring, because you can in fact quit background services on most mobile platforms, and it's a necessary thing to do. It's only programs that by design, always gracefully suspend, full stop, and resume later that make sense to not have a quit command.
- shareme 16y ago
  ahem, in mobile we do not have quit..nothing broke not even the mobile users :)
  - michaelcampbell 16y ago
    Maybe it's confirmation bias, but I had to learn the metaphor of "no quit option", and I welcome the quit button/option on apps that have them. I have seen many, many users; particularly new Android users; that wonder where the quit button is, and what happens when they just "leave" the current application. So, no, it may not have "broken" anything, but it has caused significantly wide, if not deep, cognitive dissonance.
  - SkyMarshal 16y ago
mgkimsal 16y ago
"A few behemoth applications, such as LibreOffice and Gimp, still keep “Quit” separate from “Close” for the original reason — to save you from having to wait for the application to relaunch after closing its only document. But that is fixable, and all other applications have become fast enough that they don’t need it any more. After all, they’re running on hardware that is hundreds of times faster than it was in 1984." "all other applications have become fast enough that they don’t need it any more". I'm glad this person has decided what I should consider 'fast enough'. So kind of him. As much as I didn't really like the Mac 'quit' model (as distinct from closing the last document window), most apps still take a long time - meaning I can notice it - when opening from a cold start. Perhaps when everyone has SSDs this will be less noticeable, but it's still noticeable/measurable to me. I remember working with a guy in 1997 who was fawning over how fast the next Windows was going to be. "It'll boot up in, like, 4 seconds!". Right... however fast our hardware becomes, our apps fill up the hardware with more 'stuff'.
- silentbicycle 16y ago
  While CPUs have gotten much faster (60%/year), memory hasn't kept up (barely 10%/year). Most programs spend much of their time moving data around in memory, because common programming styles lead to data that is extremely fragmented (poor locality) - memory is the bottleneck, not processor speeds. http://seven-degrees-of-freedom.blogspot.com/2009/10/latency-elephant.html http://seven-degrees-of-freedom.blogspot.com/2009/10/latency...
- michaelcampbell 16y ago
  I have SSD's. In RAID-0 striping mode. You still notice it.
  - mgkimsal 16y ago
    That's a bit depressing to hear. The SSD perf I've seen on laptops seemed great, but I suspect that in conjunction with slower memory, we'll still see issues. :/
    - 16y ago
stewbrew 16y ago
This looked like an interesting read. But then they mentioned Rhythmbox and I remembered the one thing I hate about that player: that stupid icon that stubbornly stays there in the notification area even if I don't want to listen to music any longer. I think you could easily make the opposite point: With slower media (floppy disk, slower hard disks etc.) starting an app was costly. This is why people tried to avoid quitting an app just to select a file. Today hard disks (especially SSDs) are fast. Quitting and starting an app is rather cheap. (With the exception of those commercial apps that try hard to make you feel that they were worth the money.) I thus would like to propose to get rid of all those "Open file" dialogs. In the age of multitasking, they are an obvious case of cargo cult.
kristofferR 16y ago
We killed their server. There's a cache here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KY4Mjyl8z1cJ:design.canonical.com/2011/03/quit/+http://design.canonical.com/2011/03/quit/&hl=no&gl=no&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KY4Mjyl... I'm not sure if any there was any images in the post.
dman 16y ago
a) Does this mean ubuntu will be patching each and every application in synaptic to follow this new paradigm? b) Isnt an explicit action more favorable over an implicit action? ie a direct mapping between what the user is doing and what happens with system resources. c) How do you close emacs with 25 buffers or browsers with 20 tabs in this new world?
tszming 16y ago
>> Phone and tablet operating systems, such as Android and iOS, have abolished the ideas of “quitting” or even “closing” applications altogether. Try to Google "android task killer" to see what users need.
rbarooah 16y ago
With all the acknowledgement of Apple's role on the history of this, I have to wonder whether they are aware that Apple has been laying the groundwork for doing the same thing since Snow Leopard, and that Lion can already automatically quit and even pre-start applications without the user's involvement. That said, I suspect Apple will keep the "quit" menu item even if it's not necessary for at least one version so that people have a chance to learn that it isn't necessary without being freaked out by it's sudden disappearance. Also, although app developers have been encouraged to adopt to the new conventions, there will be plenty of legacy apps that don't for some time to come.
marshray 16y ago
A document you 'close', an application you 'exit' or 'quit'. The document-centric people have been trying to do away with applications since the the beginning of GUIs. It reality, the document metaphor works great for a few things that resemble documents. But documents are as much an artifact of the paper-handling wold as processess login sessions are to the electronic world. Are they really more fundamental than, say, a stapler? Is a stapler worthy of being a fundamental pervasive metaphor for interaction? Games? Videos? Terminal windows? Phone calls? Desktop sharing? Text and IM? Many of the things we do with computers have little to do with documents.
- Tangaroa 16y ago
  Efforts to implement the stapler model include "Cut and Paste" and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). Microsoft thought you ought to be able to staple anything to anything, like a terminal in the middle of your word document or a clock on your spreadsheet, for no reason other than just because you can. It didn't work because app developers needed to do too much work to support it, so few programs other than Microsoft's own office software were built to link items together like that.
- aw3c2 16y ago
  Then don't call them documents but objects (as in the OOP principle).
ajdecon 16y ago
I'm happy that Canonical is thinking about usability, but has any of this actually been backed up by any kind of experiment? I see one link on Google to a study done on Thunderbird (sadly down, as it's the same blog), and a bunch of blogspam related to it, but very little evidence that the recent radical changes they are making have undergone any usability testing. If you're trying to help users, shouldn't you study their actual behavior? I admit though that this is not my field, and I could be using poor search terms.
- sixtofour 16y ago
  I've been subconsciously watching this minimization trend go by. The latest instance I've seen is in FF4, where the forward/backward button has lost its little dropdown indicator. Now you have to know it's there, and use a right click to get the list of sites. Not being a UI/UX/UXB guy, I have to wonder if there's some magazine they or their managers all read, that had an article advocating minimalizing, 'cause there sure seems to be a bandwagon rolling through town.
Ruudjah 16y ago
> Error establishing a database connection Nice way to quit. We did it. We HackerNewsed it. Uh. YCombinatored it. Hm. We hacked it. No. We slashd... NO. We Redd.. NO! o.O
viraptor 16y ago
So if I understand it correctly: First they threw away the rhythmbox tray icon and made it quit on "X" in order "not to clutter the tray". Then they reverted to their own meta-trayicon and made even more applications fold to tray on "X". Now they want to remove "quit" completely and make "X" a "maybe quit, maybe close, you don't need to know the answer"? I'd really like it if they started publishing their research / references / discussions. Right now it seems like they just do what they want and wait to see if it works or not.
strlen 16y ago
The recent UI changes in Ubuntu (getting rid of X11, now this?) seem just crazy. I use Ubuntu on my machine, because I want a developer friendly OS. Recently, however, it just has not been the case: for example, OCaml 3.12 is still unavailable in apt repos (even on "unstable" branches), despite it being available in Fedora/CentOS yum repos or in macports. Same for Scala 2.8.x, Erlang R14, etc... Has the Ubuntu team completely forgotten its original constituency in pursuit of "Linux that your grandparents can use on their netbook?"? Looks like back to debian-unstable (or Fedora rawhide?) for me.
brown9-2 16y ago
This sounds like a solution to a non-existent problem.
Flow 16y ago
I hope Canonical picks up GnuStep some day. I remember the first days of GNOME, a Windows-clone in looks, with an ambitious acronym "GNU Network Object Model Environment". Are they anywhere near that acronym in vision today?
rubergly 16y ago
I'm significantly confused. The article seems to be talking about the distinction that OS X has between closing a window and quitting an application, and talking about how this behavior exists on Windows and Ubuntu as well. I must be missing something somewhere.
gue5t 16y ago
I was really hoping this was exactly what the headline made it sound like. It is interesting to see the history of the quit/close pair in programs though.
hristov 16y ago
As an Ubuntu user, these articles scare the hell out of me. The quit or exit command is not confusing at all. And if you want to get rid of it, you'd better make sure that none of your programs have any memory leaks ever (good luck with that). You know what is much more confusing than the quit command? Having to go into the CLI or the task manager and kill stuff manually because it is eating half of your memory and processor time doing nothing. Or having to restart your PC every day because it just gets slow after a while. Here is the most important thing about GUI design - you should confirm people's expectations. People expect to be able to quit stuff. It is extremely annoying that this starry eyed experimentation is going on in the most popular Linux distro. They are basically risking the one foothold Linux has been able to make in the desktop world. If you want to experiment, you should start an experimental distro and not risk your's and Linux's one single solid success.
- ggchappell 16y ago
  > It is extremely annoying that this starry eyed experimentation is going on in the most popular Linux distro. They are basically risking the one foothold Linux has been able to make in the desktop world. If you want to experiment, you should start an experimental distro and not risk your's and Linux's one single solid success. That is an excellent point, and one that worries me, too. On the other hand, I'm glad that some major player in the Linux world has an interest in UI experimentation. How to reconcile these two thoughts? Maybe what we need is another Ubuntu variant (like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc.) that is stuffed full of experimental ideas. And then the best ones get into the more mainline releases.
  - th 16y ago
    Less Linux-savvy Ubuntu users are less likely to try out a non-mainstream distro/variant. It's hard to find the "best ones" without testing these new features on these users. Sometimes your users are your Guinea pigs. I think Ubuntu will be fine as long as they remain responsive to user feedback and maintain "get me back to what I'm used to" options for experimental features.
    - 16y ago
Gormo 16y ago
Can anyone recommend a good novice-friendly Linux distro with a clean, consistent UI that isn't being progressively replaced with presumptuous avant-garde nonsense?
- hasenj 16y ago
  Grab a (recent) version of Ubuntu and don't upgrade. This only sounds like a joke, but it's not. Ubuntu is perfectly fine with the idea of not upgrading for years. Hence LTS releases.
joe_the_user 16y ago
It seems like most of what he's complaining about stems from the illogic of the MDI interface (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface) and has nothing to do with the Quit command as such. But really, what you want is for every document-editing app to open a single document, with maybe some tools on the side. The problems he mentions here go away and the "quit" menu option remains perfectly logical. It's made a little tougher through Browser-tabs being the bastard-son of MDI. But seriously, multiple windows should be handled by the taskbar or some other thing. Music is tougher question but considering every the Linux jukebox apps I know is a complete pig on resources, some way to quit pretty necessary.
Derbasti 16y ago
Anyone else thinking that this is pretty much imitating the way OSX works? Not that this is necessarily a bad thing...
cppsnob 16y ago
File under "things that don't need fixing".
EGreg 16y ago
This guy may be happy to know that the new Mac OS that's coming out doesn't have running lights on the dock by default. So you can't really tell if an application has quit or not. In fact, apps now resume when launched. The trouble is, not all apps support resuming when launched. So it's like a big mishmash and you're quite sure which are running and which are not. The transition will not be pretty! I'm gonna turn my running lights back on as the first thing I do on the new Mac OS. Look, I actually LIKED the Mac's paradigm of being application-centric, and not document-centric. The latter was Windows' way: MDI, SDI, and all that. When you closed the last window, the app closed. Or did it? On the Mac, I had control over when I wanted the app to close. Even when I did not do development, I understood what was a program and what was a document. It ain't that hard to do. As a developer, I really love to know what app is running and be able to shut it down, without having to force-quit it.
csandreasen 16y ago
This brings to mind the X session management protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_session_manager http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_session_manager) that never seemed to be used be in modern Linux applications. Issues that others brought up regarding memory consumption could be addressed with more consistent use of this or a similar protocol. While intended for saving state on logout, there's no reason the window manager/session manager/something else couldn't just direct an application in the background to save state and then kill it when memory gets low. That said, it's probably a bit too late in the game to establish such a policy. Users would be more likely to blame the desktop environment for killing the program and losing all of their work instead of blaming the application for not saving the state to begin with.
hasenj 16y ago
For me, as a power user, "quit" means "stop doing anything!!", for an IM app, it means: stop showing me as available, stop using my yahoo login because I want this other program to use it! Just stop everything! Don't assume "oh you just want to be offline!", NO! I want to stop you in your tracks and prevent you from doing anything what-so-ever. I quit an application when I feel it's not doing what I want. I quit an application when I feel the application is being presumptuous and making false assumptions about what I want to do. I hardly ever quit an application because I need the memory .. it's not about process/memory management. I often close application to reduce clutter on my desktop, and clutter can be reduced without actually quitting applications, so they have a point there, but I'd still hate it if applications assume that I don't really want to quit. It really annoys me that closing Banshee doesn't stop it from playing music. It's about setting rules and drawing lines; it's about having control over one's out computer. I quit a movie/music player to stop from emitting sounds. No, the sound menu is not enough replacement. It might be a good alternative, but not good enough to warrant "never quitting the media application". I open a browser in private mode then quit it, because .. well it's private mode; if you can't quit it it kinda defeats the point. I quit a download application (e.g. a torrent client) to stop it from downloading/uploading (to free up bandwidth). You could try to rethink every use case, and you can provide other ways to achieve the same goals. But, in the end, this is not a good reason to make applications non-quit-able.

138 points by marcog1 16y ago

I'm certainly impressed that the Canonical team are thinking about UI issues in this much depth. It is admittedly FAR more thought than I've ever given to the 'Quit' command, ever. And while my initial thought is that there are much more important UI/UX issues to be solved in Ubuntu before this, I think that thinking of things like this are key in fixing the global UI altogether. I'm not entirely certain of whether or not this is the best suggestion though. I LIKE to quit applications. I like knowing that they aren't running in the background, that they aren't consuming resources, that they aren't going to pop up a notification, that they aren't cluttering up my taskbar. I'm the same way with browser tabs -- I don't like having any more open than I need. If I'm in the middle of something, and need to have a lot of tabs open, I'll generally open a new browser for my casual browsing that I can close when I'm finished. Conversely, I almost always keep Photoshop open, even if it's idle, because launching it takes more than a couple of seconds. I don't know if getting rid of quit is exactly what I'm looking for.

DanI-S 16y ago
I feel the same way as you do - I like to feel my system is clean and uncluttered. However, I still agree with their thoughts. We may like quitting applications, but realistically, memory/CPU management is something that can and should be handled by the OS. It's an overhead on the user's mind that can be dealt with perfectly well by clever automation. It should keep itself clean without needing our help. A kid growing up in a world without the 'quit' button would not feel anything is missing; we've just been conditioned by the creaky operating systems of our own youth.
- bmelton 16y ago
  I don't necessarily disagree. Most of my complaints are systems of the existing broken paradigm. That my taskbar is cluttered up could easily be fixed with their suggestions, and a part of their remedy might even be to get rid of the taskbar altogether. The proof is in the putting, and with conceptual changes like this, I'm leery of judging before I see the actual results. For the most part, backgrounded running applications don't take up resources unless they're supposed to (like music playing, or an uptime monitor, etc.) so I don't have any qualms about leaving that to the OS (unless they screw it up,) but all the other visual aspects need to be dealt with at the same time for this to be effective.
- scott_s 16y ago
  I quit applications because open applications leave UI remnants laying around. If they can figure out a way to do the Right Thing with the UI, then it wouldn't bother me.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

joaquin_win 16y ago

It seems to be down, google cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KY4Mjyl8z1cJ:design.canonical.com/2011/03/quit/+site:http://design.canonical.com/2011/03/quit/&hl=en&gl=ca&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KY4Mjyl...

jontas 16y ago
I thought the down website was related to the headline..
- zephjc 16y ago
  "That's it, we're quitting. Sincerely, The Canonical database servers"

aeden 16y ago

Looks like their server feels the same way. (Sorry, I had to say it)

silentbicycle 16y ago
No, you really didn't. Comments like this add nothing to the discussion. Couldn't you have at least linked to the google cache? http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KY4Mjyl8z1cJ:design.canonical.com/2011/03/quit/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KY4Mjyl...
- aeden 16y ago
  Someone else had already linked to the google cache, but thanks for playing.

gm 16y ago

This argument is pointless. The argument makes no sense without putting in the context of content creation vs content consumption. Content creation is very resource incentive. If you don't quit any apps ever, you run out of resources. Simple as that. Content consumption, on the other hand is easy and very optimized. Always have your browser running with 10 pages loaded at the same time you have your music player running and have a movie paused. No problem. Never quit anything. Then the argument starts to make some sense.

alextp 16y ago
It's not about never quitting, though. It's about quitting when you close the last document, or something similar, and breaking the distinction between closing and quitting. Heavy-duty apps should quit in the background after you close what you were working on, but this shouldn't necessarily matter to the user.
- zacharypinter 16y ago
  Right, or go into some sort of tombstoned mode when resources are needed and the app hasn't been in the foreground for a while.

extension 16y ago

Awesome. Next, get rid of "Save", which is an even bigger problem.

robryan 16y ago
Makes a lot of sense, if you kept a transparent source control of every change made to something and constantly updated it on each change. The issue though is how everyone is used to save. I guess a regular save can be the same idea as a tag in version control with the automated stuff to, I think the next OSX was doing something like this?
- gwern 16y ago
  > Makes a lot of sense, if you kept a transparent source control of every change made to something and constantly updated it on each change. The issue though is how everyone is used to save. True enough, but they're also getting used to transparent saving. You don't 'save' your state in Gmail; if Firefox or your computer crashes, you didn't 'save' the current tab state. And so on. The state is just there and always up-to-date. If you look, you can see how they are saving in the background every X seconds (such as Gmail's composition warning), but I imagine most people simply gloss over that.
zoul 16y ago
http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/ http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/ “Say good-bye to manual saving. Auto Save in Mac OS X Lion automatically saves your work — while you work — so you don’t have to. Lion saves changes in the working document instead of creating additional copies, making the best use of available disk space. The lock feature prevents inadvertent changes from being saved and automatically locks documents after two weeks. And the revert feature returns you to the state the document was in when you last opened it, so you can feel free to experiment with confidence.” Makes perfect sense to me.
- GHFigs 16y ago
  The remarkable thing is that for thirty years we've been using tools that default to destroying your work. I can't think of a better example of our collective tolerance for janky technology than the persistence of such a glaring regression from the typewriters (etc) that personal computers replaced.

vytis 16y ago

I guess the next one in line should be getting rid of file as a concept. Not much point knowing where exactly the song you want to listen or a movie you want to play is stored.

extension 16y ago
Depends what you mean by "where". With respect to finding it amongst other files, making it available on portable devices, sharing it (or NOT sharing it) with others, "where" is very important to the user. What we really want is the user's concept of a file decoupled from the system's concept, and then cleansed of various baggage from the prior coupling. That's very different than making it a system concept exclusively.
- vytis 16y ago
  I meant from a user's perspective. You shouldn't care if the song is stored in /foo/bar or in a remote database somewhere in the cloud. You access it through some obvious interface e.g. iTunes. Having 'file' as a central concept of accessing data doesn't have much connection to the actual way it is used. My vim config file doesn't have much in common with a song I've just downloaded. It is stored the same way, but that's about it.
  - extension 16y ago
    Most aspects of the file concept are indispensable to the user. A generic data container is what allows us to have standardized document formats not coupled to applications or platforms and generalized organizing, packaging, sharing, storage, and search. These are user concepts that can't be abstracted away without sacrificing enormous amounts of utility. The aspects that the user can do without are related to sharing the file system with software that uses it as a backend store.

mycroftiv 16y ago

I get so frustrated reading blog posts by user interface designers. They almost invariably consist of reasoning I disagree and conclusions I disagree with in support of user interface decisions that make my experience as a user worse. Ubuntu Unity is pretty much an anthology of user interface decisions that are exactly wrong by my perception, and "lets get rid of quit" is just another one. Of all the actions in any menu ever, "quit" is one of the few that I thought confused no one. Then I read something like: "in Ubuntu, we have some elements waiting to help out: the messaging menu, the me menu, and the sound menu" and discover the concept is stuffing functionality into a maze of predetermined slots based on a set of usage assumptions. I don't think any of this is responding to the needs of users, I think its the equivalent of rearranging the furniture in the middle of the night so people trip over the couch when they are walking to the bathroom.

gregschlom 16y ago
Now I know what I'll be doing at 3am tonight.
ams6110 16y ago
rearranging the furniture in the middle of the night so people trip over the couch when they are walking to the bathroom Exactly how I felt about the "new" Microsoft Office UI and the straw that broke the camels back on my continued use of that software.
- raintrees 16y ago
  It would seem that existing users' knowledge of menu/button layout was sacrificed for new users' organizational benefits. From a "never having used Office before" point of view, it is more logical now. From my power user's point of view, the first 30 hours of usage had an additional 5-10 hours (wag) of "okay, where would they have moved THAT feature to?"
- run4yourlives 16y ago
  It's funny, because from my perspective as a casual office user, I actually thought the menus made things a little easier to use, even if I needed to "re-learn" where things were. My wife however, much more of a "power" office user, has completely sworn off of them. This is a person that knew pretty much where every menu item on word and excel was by memory. Her experience has been destroyed, so much that I needed to re-install 2003 on all the machines that she would use. Most certainly tripping on couches.

hsmyers 16y ago

I'm sorry, I just don't see where the problem is. To take two applications that I run almost continuously, an editor and a browser, both have multiple instances of task--- both shown to me as windows as it happens. No problem in either opening or closing them. The mechanism is as old as windowed operating systems; find the menu item that says close or click in the corner (or it's analogue.) This action scales; do the same thing if I wish to close the app (although as was pointed out in passing in the article, this action is decreasing.) Is there anyone reading this that is confused over these actions? I really don't think so. Instead of the disparaging remark about cargo-cult interface design, maybe it was a case of the designers understanding that there are some wheels that need to be shared and not re-invented. Given the time these methods have been in place and in use, it doesn't seem like a good thing to change without a much more compelling argument.

johkra 16y ago
Many applications have both a "close" and a "quit" option. The "close" option does what you describe - they want to get rid of the "quit" option, which is used to quit an application. (Try opening two Firefox windows and you can easily see the difference.)

lukeschlather 16y ago

Getting rid of quit/close requires the user to learn entirely new metaphors every time they use a program in order to know how to get a program to stop taking up resources. In a system with effectively limitless resources this is fine, but in lower specced systems, not so much. Also "effectively limitless" means equivalent to the specs of the worst system the designers use, which will likely skew things. Where I'm sitting we share 384K down / 128K up between about 40 people. Updaters that refuse to stop downloading when you close them really bog down the network. Now, you could try and put in some custom menu to control that sort of thing, but that's going to be a mess of configuration and hard choices, and developers will have to do that for every single app. Quit/Close are two well-defined commands that give the user a well defined way to say when they want something to go away vs. when they want something to go away and quit doing anything. Re-implementing "go away and quit working" on a case-by-case basis is going to end up with every app either having a nonstandard interface for doing so, or no way to do so at all (like most update managers.) Personally, I think "some apps don't quit properly" is a description of a problem with the apps, not with the "quit" command. Comparing to mobile is a red herring, because you can in fact quit background services on most mobile platforms, and it's a necessary thing to do. It's only programs that by design, always gracefully suspend, full stop, and resume later that make sense to not have a quit command.

shareme 16y ago
ahem, in mobile we do not have quit..nothing broke not even the mobile users :)
- michaelcampbell 16y ago
  Maybe it's confirmation bias, but I had to learn the metaphor of "no quit option", and I welcome the quit button/option on apps that have them. I have seen many, many users; particularly new Android users; that wonder where the quit button is, and what happens when they just "leave" the current application. So, no, it may not have "broken" anything, but it has caused significantly wide, if not deep, cognitive dissonance.
- SkyMarshal 16y ago

mgkimsal 16y ago

"A few behemoth applications, such as LibreOffice and Gimp, still keep “Quit” separate from “Close” for the original reason — to save you from having to wait for the application to relaunch after closing its only document. But that is fixable, and all other applications have become fast enough that they don’t need it any more. After all, they’re running on hardware that is hundreds of times faster than it was in 1984." "all other applications have become fast enough that they don’t need it any more". I'm glad this person has decided what I should consider 'fast enough'. So kind of him. As much as I didn't really like the Mac 'quit' model (as distinct from closing the last document window), most apps still take a long time - meaning I can notice it - when opening from a cold start. Perhaps when everyone has SSDs this will be less noticeable, but it's still noticeable/measurable to me. I remember working with a guy in 1997 who was fawning over how fast the next Windows was going to be. "It'll boot up in, like, 4 seconds!". Right... however fast our hardware becomes, our apps fill up the hardware with more 'stuff'.

silentbicycle 16y ago
While CPUs have gotten much faster (60%/year), memory hasn't kept up (barely 10%/year). Most programs spend much of their time moving data around in memory, because common programming styles lead to data that is extremely fragmented (poor locality) - memory is the bottleneck, not processor speeds. http://seven-degrees-of-freedom.blogspot.com/2009/10/latency-elephant.html http://seven-degrees-of-freedom.blogspot.com/2009/10/latency...
michaelcampbell 16y ago
I have SSD's. In RAID-0 striping mode. You still notice it.
- mgkimsal 16y ago
  That's a bit depressing to hear. The SSD perf I've seen on laptops seemed great, but I suspect that in conjunction with slower memory, we'll still see issues. :/
  - 16y ago

stewbrew 16y ago

This looked like an interesting read. But then they mentioned Rhythmbox and I remembered the one thing I hate about that player: that stupid icon that stubbornly stays there in the notification area even if I don't want to listen to music any longer. I think you could easily make the opposite point: With slower media (floppy disk, slower hard disks etc.) starting an app was costly. This is why people tried to avoid quitting an app just to select a file. Today hard disks (especially SSDs) are fast. Quitting and starting an app is rather cheap. (With the exception of those commercial apps that try hard to make you feel that they were worth the money.) I thus would like to propose to get rid of all those "Open file" dialogs. In the age of multitasking, they are an obvious case of cargo cult.

kristofferR 16y ago

We killed their server. There's a cache here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KY4Mjyl8z1cJ:design.canonical.com/2011/03/quit/+http://design.canonical.com/2011/03/quit/&hl=no&gl=no&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KY4Mjyl... I'm not sure if any there was any images in the post.

dman 16y ago

a) Does this mean ubuntu will be patching each and every application in synaptic to follow this new paradigm? b) Isnt an explicit action more favorable over an implicit action? ie a direct mapping between what the user is doing and what happens with system resources. c) How do you close emacs with 25 buffers or browsers with 20 tabs in this new world?

tszming 16y ago

>> Phone and tablet operating systems, such as Android and iOS, have abolished the ideas of “quitting” or even “closing” applications altogether. Try to Google "android task killer" to see what users need.

rbarooah 16y ago

With all the acknowledgement of Apple's role on the history of this, I have to wonder whether they are aware that Apple has been laying the groundwork for doing the same thing since Snow Leopard, and that Lion can already automatically quit and even pre-start applications without the user's involvement. That said, I suspect Apple will keep the "quit" menu item even if it's not necessary for at least one version so that people have a chance to learn that it isn't necessary without being freaked out by it's sudden disappearance. Also, although app developers have been encouraged to adopt to the new conventions, there will be plenty of legacy apps that don't for some time to come.

marshray 16y ago

A document you 'close', an application you 'exit' or 'quit'. The document-centric people have been trying to do away with applications since the the beginning of GUIs. It reality, the document metaphor works great for a few things that resemble documents. But documents are as much an artifact of the paper-handling wold as processess login sessions are to the electronic world. Are they really more fundamental than, say, a stapler? Is a stapler worthy of being a fundamental pervasive metaphor for interaction? Games? Videos? Terminal windows? Phone calls? Desktop sharing? Text and IM? Many of the things we do with computers have little to do with documents.

Tangaroa 16y ago
Efforts to implement the stapler model include "Cut and Paste" and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). Microsoft thought you ought to be able to staple anything to anything, like a terminal in the middle of your word document or a clock on your spreadsheet, for no reason other than just because you can. It didn't work because app developers needed to do too much work to support it, so few programs other than Microsoft's own office software were built to link items together like that.
aw3c2 16y ago
Then don't call them documents but objects (as in the OOP principle).

ajdecon 16y ago

I'm happy that Canonical is thinking about usability, but has any of this actually been backed up by any kind of experiment? I see one link on Google to a study done on Thunderbird (sadly down, as it's the same blog), and a bunch of blogspam related to it, but very little evidence that the recent radical changes they are making have undergone any usability testing. If you're trying to help users, shouldn't you study their actual behavior? I admit though that this is not my field, and I could be using poor search terms.

sixtofour 16y ago
I've been subconsciously watching this minimization trend go by. The latest instance I've seen is in FF4, where the forward/backward button has lost its little dropdown indicator. Now you have to know it's there, and use a right click to get the list of sites. Not being a UI/UX/UXB guy, I have to wonder if there's some magazine they or their managers all read, that had an article advocating minimalizing, 'cause there sure seems to be a bandwagon rolling through town.

Ruudjah 16y ago

> Error establishing a database connection Nice way to quit. We did it. We HackerNewsed it. Uh. YCombinatored it. Hm. We hacked it. No. We slashd... NO. We Redd.. NO! o.O

viraptor 16y ago

So if I understand it correctly: First they threw away the rhythmbox tray icon and made it quit on "X" in order "not to clutter the tray". Then they reverted to their own meta-trayicon and made even more applications fold to tray on "X". Now they want to remove "quit" completely and make "X" a "maybe quit, maybe close, you don't need to know the answer"? I'd really like it if they started publishing their research / references / discussions. Right now it seems like they just do what they want and wait to see if it works or not.

strlen 16y ago

The recent UI changes in Ubuntu (getting rid of X11, now this?) seem just crazy. I use Ubuntu on my machine, because I want a developer friendly OS. Recently, however, it just has not been the case: for example, OCaml 3.12 is still unavailable in apt repos (even on "unstable" branches), despite it being available in Fedora/CentOS yum repos or in macports. Same for Scala 2.8.x, Erlang R14, etc... Has the Ubuntu team completely forgotten its original constituency in pursuit of "Linux that your grandparents can use on their netbook?"? Looks like back to debian-unstable (or Fedora rawhide?) for me.

brown9-2 16y ago

This sounds like a solution to a non-existent problem.

Flow 16y ago

I hope Canonical picks up GnuStep some day. I remember the first days of GNOME, a Windows-clone in looks, with an ambitious acronym "GNU Network Object Model Environment". Are they anywhere near that acronym in vision today?

rubergly 16y ago

I'm significantly confused. The article seems to be talking about the distinction that OS X has between closing a window and quitting an application, and talking about how this behavior exists on Windows and Ubuntu as well. I must be missing something somewhere.

gue5t 16y ago

I was really hoping this was exactly what the headline made it sound like. It is interesting to see the history of the quit/close pair in programs though.

hristov 16y ago

As an Ubuntu user, these articles scare the hell out of me. The quit or exit command is not confusing at all. And if you want to get rid of it, you'd better make sure that none of your programs have any memory leaks ever (good luck with that). You know what is much more confusing than the quit command? Having to go into the CLI or the task manager and kill stuff manually because it is eating half of your memory and processor time doing nothing. Or having to restart your PC every day because it just gets slow after a while. Here is the most important thing about GUI design - you should confirm people's expectations. People expect to be able to quit stuff. It is extremely annoying that this starry eyed experimentation is going on in the most popular Linux distro. They are basically risking the one foothold Linux has been able to make in the desktop world. If you want to experiment, you should start an experimental distro and not risk your's and Linux's one single solid success.

ggchappell 16y ago
> It is extremely annoying that this starry eyed experimentation is going on in the most popular Linux distro. They are basically risking the one foothold Linux has been able to make in the desktop world. If you want to experiment, you should start an experimental distro and not risk your's and Linux's one single solid success. That is an excellent point, and one that worries me, too. On the other hand, I'm glad that some major player in the Linux world has an interest in UI experimentation. How to reconcile these two thoughts? Maybe what we need is another Ubuntu variant (like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc.) that is stuffed full of experimental ideas. And then the best ones get into the more mainline releases.
- th 16y ago
  Less Linux-savvy Ubuntu users are less likely to try out a non-mainstream distro/variant. It's hard to find the "best ones" without testing these new features on these users. Sometimes your users are your Guinea pigs. I think Ubuntu will be fine as long as they remain responsive to user feedback and maintain "get me back to what I'm used to" options for experimental features.
  - 16y ago

Gormo 16y ago

Can anyone recommend a good novice-friendly Linux distro with a clean, consistent UI that isn't being progressively replaced with presumptuous avant-garde nonsense?

hasenj 16y ago
Grab a (recent) version of Ubuntu and don't upgrade. This only sounds like a joke, but it's not. Ubuntu is perfectly fine with the idea of not upgrading for years. Hence LTS releases.

joe_the_user 16y ago

It seems like most of what he's complaining about stems from the illogic of the MDI interface (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface) and has nothing to do with the Quit command as such. But really, what you want is for every document-editing app to open a single document, with maybe some tools on the side. The problems he mentions here go away and the "quit" menu option remains perfectly logical. It's made a little tougher through Browser-tabs being the bastard-son of MDI. But seriously, multiple windows should be handled by the taskbar or some other thing. Music is tougher question but considering every the Linux jukebox apps I know is a complete pig on resources, some way to quit pretty necessary.

Derbasti 16y ago

Anyone else thinking that this is pretty much imitating the way OSX works? Not that this is necessarily a bad thing...

cppsnob 16y ago

File under "things that don't need fixing".

EGreg 16y ago

This guy may be happy to know that the new Mac OS that's coming out doesn't have running lights on the dock by default. So you can't really tell if an application has quit or not. In fact, apps now resume when launched. The trouble is, not all apps support resuming when launched. So it's like a big mishmash and you're quite sure which are running and which are not. The transition will not be pretty! I'm gonna turn my running lights back on as the first thing I do on the new Mac OS. Look, I actually LIKED the Mac's paradigm of being application-centric, and not document-centric. The latter was Windows' way: MDI, SDI, and all that. When you closed the last window, the app closed. Or did it? On the Mac, I had control over when I wanted the app to close. Even when I did not do development, I understood what was a program and what was a document. It ain't that hard to do. As a developer, I really love to know what app is running and be able to shut it down, without having to force-quit it.

csandreasen 16y ago

This brings to mind the X session management protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_session_manager http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_session_manager) that never seemed to be used be in modern Linux applications. Issues that others brought up regarding memory consumption could be addressed with more consistent use of this or a similar protocol. While intended for saving state on logout, there's no reason the window manager/session manager/something else couldn't just direct an application in the background to save state and then kill it when memory gets low. That said, it's probably a bit too late in the game to establish such a policy. Users would be more likely to blame the desktop environment for killing the program and losing all of their work instead of blaming the application for not saving the state to begin with.

hasenj 16y ago

For me, as a power user, "quit" means "stop doing anything!!", for an IM app, it means: stop showing me as available, stop using my yahoo login because I want this other program to use it! Just stop everything! Don't assume "oh you just want to be offline!", NO! I want to stop you in your tracks and prevent you from doing anything what-so-ever. I quit an application when I feel it's not doing what I want. I quit an application when I feel the application is being presumptuous and making false assumptions about what I want to do. I hardly ever quit an application because I need the memory .. it's not about process/memory management. I often close application to reduce clutter on my desktop, and clutter can be reduced without actually quitting applications, so they have a point there, but I'd still hate it if applications assume that I don't really want to quit. It really annoys me that closing Banshee doesn't stop it from playing music. It's about setting rules and drawing lines; it's about having control over one's out computer. I quit a movie/music player to stop from emitting sounds. No, the sound menu is not enough replacement. It might be a good alternative, but not good enough to warrant "never quitting the media application". I open a browser in private mode then quit it, because .. well it's private mode; if you can't quit it it kinda defeats the point. I quit a download application (e.g. a torrent client) to stop it from downloading/uploading (to free up bandwidth). You could try to rethink every use case, and you can provide other ways to achieve the same goals. But, in the end, this is not a good reason to make applications non-quit-able.