11 ms·

Swift Quit – Automatic App Quitting on Mac

72 points by alin23 4y ago

pensatoio 4y ago
A cool concept. Probably most useful for people migrating from Windows? Cmd + Q is second nature after a while.
- andybak 4y ago
  You're assuming a group who are generally aware of shortcut keys and utilize them. That's probably the minority.
  - omnibrain 4y ago
    German Windows users usually discover how to close applications by shortcut very quickly. Usually when they try to write their first email on a Mac.
    - joombaga 4y ago
      Why?
      - SyrupThinker 4y ago
        On the German keyboard layout the “@“ Symbol is entered by holding the “AltGr” modifier to the right of the space bar and pressing “Q”. So on the German Mac layout you are holding the Command key and pressing Q, closing the Application. The right input would be Option-L.
  - BuckyBeaver 4y ago
    Unfortunately, Apple proponents love to smugly point to hotkeys as if "it's so simple." Great example: Apple's bizarre and petty refusal to put a real Delete key on its laptop or non-full-sized keyboards. They only have a Backspace key, mislabeled "delete." This means that millions of users are arrowing (or moving the insertion point by hand) across the characters they want to delete and backspacing them away. Apple apologists will howl, NOOOO! Command-delete! As if any normal user (especially switching from another platform) would guess this. And yes, they would have to guess this, because it's not marked on the keyboard. This became doubly inexcusable with the deprecation of the Eject key. It's not as if Apple could pretend that there was "no room" for a Delete key... not that they could anyway, since everyone else manages to provide one.
    - madeofpalk 4y ago
      Mac is the only operating system with keyboard shortcuts? I don't think there's a wrong or a right way here, there's just what you're used to. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure if I completely understand your complaint - I almost exclusively use Windows and I'm not really sure what the Delete key does but is just 'reverse backspace'? I never use it.
      - BuckyBeaver 4y ago
        Nobody said the Mac is the only operating system with keyboard shortcuts, so maybe you're replying to the wrong comment there. The Delete key deletes the character to the right of the insertion point; the Backspace key deletes the character to the left. You must be wasting a lot of keystrokes! A Delete key also deletes stuff; like E-mails, files... any currently-selected item in most applications. I don't "backspace" E-mails or other objects to delete them.
        madeofpalk 4y ago
        I guess I just don't delete stuff from left-to-right - most of the time I'm undoing a typo I've just typed, so backspace feel more appropriate. Otherwise decades of habit just has me put the cursor to the right of characters I want to remove. Again, I don't think either is more inherently correct, there's just what you're used to.
        BuckyBeaver 4y ago
        Unfortunately, Apple has decided that Backspace IS "more correct." Everyone else has been providing both keys for decades. If you do a lot of editing, and certainly programming, you quickly chafe at the lack of a Delete key. I've been using Karabiner on the Mac to remap F12 to be Delete, losing the Volume-up control in the process. Annoying, but worth it.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - Tagbert 4y ago
    Or File/Quit which is the explicit way to quit an app.
ace2358 4y ago
Interesting app, curious what the use case is? Mac OS has always been good at managing resources for background apps (in my experience). I don’t mind if I have some extra open apps. I think I even have the setting activated that hides the ‘dot’ to show ‘running’ apps. Honestly, if you look in activity monitor there are over a hundred apps running without any windows being rendered. Maybe it’s because I’ve always had more ram than I need?
- kome 4y ago
  > Interesting app, curious what the use case is? I guess windows users?
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  I don't love having to right-click quit applications that are inexplicably still cluttering my dock after having closed all the windows.
  - jb1991 4y ago
    I just command-Q when I’m in an app if I want to just shut it down completely. One step, no right clicking nonsense.
    - webmobdev 4y ago
      What's the point of a GUI OS then? Let's get rid of the mouse and trackpad too ...
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - jachee 4y ago
        What’s the point of a keyboard in a GUI OS, then? You can just copy/paste any text you need. Just because you can stand on your right leg doesn’t mean your left leg is useless. Learning to work with keyboard shortcuts together with your point-and-click skills will make you more efficient.
barryvan 4y ago
What a great little utility -- part of my growing collection of tools to make MacOS behave more reasonably, or at least more in line with my particular expectations (which, yes, in many cases means more like Windows). I think that part of the appeal of an app like this is about keeping things "tidy". MacOS seems to be built around making it easy to clutter -- lots of randomly sized overlapping windows (resolved using Rectangle for Aero-snap like functionality -- the weird full-screen split-screen nonsense in MacOS is just frustratingly limited and slow and has too many animations and transitions to be useful), dozens of apps filling up the dock, six hundred icons in the menu bar (which I use vanilla.app to resolve), and so on. I think my mental model distinguishes between applications and utilities. Utilities are effectively like the old TSR tools -- you start them, then they just run quietly in the background until you need them, with no interface. Applications, by contrast, _are_ their interface, so it feels strange that when I close that interface, the application itself isn't closed. This utility alters the behaviour of the OS so that it conforms to this mental model. I suspect that this is a situation where there's no "right" approach, but rather a set of preferences and learned behaviours.
- jb1991 4y ago
  On Mac I usually just double click somewhere in the title bar on a window to make it automatically size to fill up the whole screen, seems to work like a charm every time. Note, I’m not talking about the full screen mode which is something different.
  - barryvan 4y ago
    I do use that, but I find that it's inconsistent. From what I can tell, it seems to toggle between the current size and the previous size -- which becomes problematic when using an external screen. Or perhaps that's just Finder -- it's hard to tell! Frustratingly, this matches the behaviour of alt-clicking (sorry, option-clicking) on the maximise button, and I really love being able to have two windows comfortably share a screen with no wasted space, aero-snap style.
    - jb1991 4y ago
vmladenov 4y ago
This is an interesting app in terms of illuminating expectations of different user groups. Back in 2010 when I got my first MacBook, the app not closing when the window closed was alien to me as someone who had only ever used Windows. But that discomfort only lasted a few months, and I grew to strongly prefer the distinction of “this app is running” and “this app is has a window open” + value the difference between Cmd-Q and Cmd-W. I remember one OS update made the app closing behavior the default, and I had to go learn where the setting was to undo it; a subsequent OS backtracked on that. The distinction is less meaningful these days with NVME making apps launch much faster than spinning 2.5” drives, but stuff like Photoshop still has a long startup time.
- BuckyBeaver 4y ago
  Why do you prefer having an app running (and owning the sole menu bar) when it has no GUI on screen? I switched to Mac 20 years ago (when I started a decade-long stint as software engineer at Apple), and I still DETEST this behavior. Why the hell do I want some application that I just "closed" to continue owning the menu? Of course, this indicts the Mac's single menu bar, glued to the top of the screen. That mistake should have been fixed with the transition to OS X, but nope. A related issue is Apple's half-assed implementation of Alt-Tab-style app switching. I was pretty impressed that they added this Windows-style feature, but less so after finding that it doesn't restore minimized apps. Again, why do I want to switch back to an app but not restore its UI? Fortunately there's a utility for that: Alt-Tab. https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app It can also create a window for applications that lack them when you switch to them; this is a huge boon for Finder.
  - scoopr 4y ago
    If its a app with a document model, it kinda has to? You close a word document, and then open another (through menu item), it shouldn't close the app in between. Also its not uncommon for me to close all the browser windows but leave the browser running, so that I can easily cmd-tab there and open new window. Yes, you can kind of workaround with some MDI style window, which you then would have to hide when not wanting to quit, but feels a bit unnecessary. In the category of "single window apps", I wouldn't want my music to stop playing just because the gui of spotify is not visible. Granted, Hide might be a better option than closing the window, depending on if the app being active is useful without the gui. With spotify in particular, I would expect space to act as a play/pause even without gui visible, though annoyingly it seems they have not implemented it like that (apple music does).
eyelidlessness 4y ago
I very explicitly do not want this functionality but I’m glad someone made it for people who do!
vletal 4y ago
I can see this being useful for old MacBooks with little RAM but I'd never used it. Closed apps running in background are like services. I do not need the window to be rendered in the background for messages or chat apps. I open them only when needed. Or having a large-ish apps I use on daily basis preloaded in compressed memory. It's just a sensible workflow.
mvac 4y ago
I recommend adding Mail and Calendar to exclusions, as these app do not sync when not running. Also there are few really annoying bugs that makes the app almost unusable: https://github.com/onebadidea/swiftquit/issues/1 https://github.com/onebadidea/swiftquit/issues/1
radley 4y ago
I use Quitter by Marco: https://marco.org/apps https://marco.org/apps I have a few dozen apps set to quit after specific periods of time. This allows me to run/resume certain apps for a few hours (VLC, Figma), while others shut down only 10 minutes after I use them (Messages, Calculator).
nicky0 4y ago
Is it called Swift Quit because it closes apps swiftly, or because it is written in Swift? Or maybe both.
madeofpalk 4y ago
Whether this app is for you or not, it must be appreciated that this is possible, and is what will distinguish 'real computers' from toy devices like iPad. There was a time where Apple was trying to make iOS/iPad the future of (Apple) computing, but it could just never happen partly because while Apple may have lowered the floor on ease-of-use, they also significantly lowered the ceiling of functionality compared to macOS (or Windows). Completely eliminated the long-tail of possibility that people use Real Computers for. iPads now have the same CPU as some Mac computers, yet they're still significantly held back by software limitations (and have been pretty much since day one).
- wil421 4y ago
  They dumb down iPads for the same reason they don’t allow a multiuser experience on iPad. They want you to buy another iPad or if you want a more capable device a Mac.
- atchoo 4y ago
  I think there is still cause for worry. Listening to John Siracusa talk about creating such utilities and it's a story of ever decreasing API features making tasks like interrogating and controlling the OS or other apps increasingly hard especially if you want to be blessed by inclusion in the platform app store. It's super risky to invest your time/money creating an app like this because the chance it is broken in the next OS update is so high. I fully agree that it's what makes computers special and I am very frustrated by "security" being the reason I can't make the computer behave as I wish. So many 3rd party fixes or innovative ideas (e.g. industry changing game mods) wouldn't have happened without malware like tactics of patching dlls which I believe every OS vendor would like to make forever impossible. Safe computing is essential but not at the cost of killing the golden goose of general purpose computing with full user control. I wish the focus was more on transparency and control of what software is doing on a system and not cutting it's legs off.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cdevroe 4y ago
Umm, no.
jmbwell 4y ago
Why does installing this app require sidestepping Gatekeeper? That’s kind of a smell.
- alin23 4y ago
  Most likely because the dev isn't paying $100/year to Apple to get a signing certificate and access to notarization.
  - hk1337 4y ago
    $100 can be a lot but it's not $100/app/year, right? For $100/year you could have several applications?
    - pyro2927 4y ago
      Yes, but this might be their only app.
    - alin23 4y ago
      It's $100/year for enrolling in the Apple Developer Program (number of apps doesn't matter): https://developer.apple.com/programs/ https://developer.apple.com/programs/ It's not a lot given what you get for the money (easy app publishing on the App Store, call support with Apple engineers etc.). But SwiftQuit's dev doesn't make money with the app so he didn't see the need to pay that money just to sign the app. An unsigned app downloaded from the dev's website is as good as a signed one.
tqwhite 4y ago
I have used Macintoshes since 1984 and I never once even noticed this dichotomy. When I looked at this app, I thought, "Huh? Why would I care about that?" I literally never once considered the accumulation of open apps to be any sort of inconvenience. Having it brought up, I realize that land on the pro-Mac-style side of the conversation. When I have used Windows (and it's a fair amount), I am often annoyed to have an app that I thought was in the Taskbar gone. The cognitive step of thinking it was there, looking for it, seeing it gone, realizing I closed its last window and hunting it down in the (still appalling) Start Menu is distracting. I consider it to be another example of my long held belief that Microsoft never, ever chosen the right alternative in any esthetic decision in its UI.
- the_gipsy 4y ago
  When I close an app, I want it closed, not in standby or running background tasks.
  - tescocles 4y ago
    ...close the app then? It's just a different paradigm. It's not like quitting the app is in any way difficult (it's just cmd+Q which I actually find a bit too easy to trigger by accident sometimes), it's just Macs don't consider an app to be the sum of its windows.
    - blacksmith_tb 4y ago
      Sure, it's not hard to hit cmd-q instead of cmd-w, I think the general question is "what's the benefit to me, the user, of having an app still running (and in memory, until it gets paged out to disk) without any windows open?" Obviously there are some kinds of apps that it makes sense to have running in the background all the time, but we're talking about text or image editors, say. I find it to be sort of annoying.
      - Tagbert 4y ago
        For document apps, the idea is that you are working on a document. You can then close that document and open another document without the app closing when you close the first document. It’s not really about having apps running in the background. It’s just a slightly different way to look at documents and apps.
Alifatisk 4y ago
Why is this not the default behaviour!?
- Tagbert 4y ago
  Because Mac users close their apps when they are done with them. If you have an app that with windows for things like documents, images, etc. When you finish one document and want to open a different document or create a new one, why should closing your first window also close the app. Do you then need to reopen the app to open the next document? In Windows the window is the app. In Mac OS, the apps have windows. It’s just a different way of looking at things.
w10-1 4y ago
Who among you can verify this isn't a huge gaping hack hole? 1. Never validated by Apple 2. Requires disabling Gatekeeper 3. Permitted to run silently in the background 4. Permitted to control any other application How would you check that even building it could run something you don't want on your computer? And if running it exposes a trojan? After all, it's the only app from user "onebadidea" on github. Please be good consumers...
readonthegoapp 4y ago
pretty awesome that someone made this. i used to think macos was was simpler than windows, but this type of 'feature' was just one of many that made me think, 'no - it was just marketing'.

72 points by alin23 4y ago

pensatoio 4y ago

A cool concept. Probably most useful for people migrating from Windows? Cmd + Q is second nature after a while.

andybak 4y ago
You're assuming a group who are generally aware of shortcut keys and utilize them. That's probably the minority.
- omnibrain 4y ago
  German Windows users usually discover how to close applications by shortcut very quickly. Usually when they try to write their first email on a Mac.
  - joombaga 4y ago
    Why?
    - SyrupThinker 4y ago
      On the German keyboard layout the “@“ Symbol is entered by holding the “AltGr” modifier to the right of the space bar and pressing “Q”. So on the German Mac layout you are holding the Command key and pressing Q, closing the Application. The right input would be Option-L.
- BuckyBeaver 4y ago
  Unfortunately, Apple proponents love to smugly point to hotkeys as if "it's so simple." Great example: Apple's bizarre and petty refusal to put a real Delete key on its laptop or non-full-sized keyboards. They only have a Backspace key, mislabeled "delete." This means that millions of users are arrowing (or moving the insertion point by hand) across the characters they want to delete and backspacing them away. Apple apologists will howl, NOOOO! Command-delete! As if any normal user (especially switching from another platform) would guess this. And yes, they would have to guess this, because it's not marked on the keyboard. This became doubly inexcusable with the deprecation of the Eject key. It's not as if Apple could pretend that there was "no room" for a Delete key... not that they could anyway, since everyone else manages to provide one.
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    Mac is the only operating system with keyboard shortcuts? I don't think there's a wrong or a right way here, there's just what you're used to. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure if I completely understand your complaint - I almost exclusively use Windows and I'm not really sure what the Delete key does but is just 'reverse backspace'? I never use it.
    - BuckyBeaver 4y ago
      Nobody said the Mac is the only operating system with keyboard shortcuts, so maybe you're replying to the wrong comment there. The Delete key deletes the character to the right of the insertion point; the Backspace key deletes the character to the left. You must be wasting a lot of keystrokes! A Delete key also deletes stuff; like E-mails, files... any currently-selected item in most applications. I don't "backspace" E-mails or other objects to delete them.
      - madeofpalk 4y ago
        I guess I just don't delete stuff from left-to-right - most of the time I'm undoing a typo I've just typed, so backspace feel more appropriate. Otherwise decades of habit just has me put the cursor to the right of characters I want to remove. Again, I don't think either is more inherently correct, there's just what you're used to.
        BuckyBeaver 4y ago
        Unfortunately, Apple has decided that Backspace IS "more correct." Everyone else has been providing both keys for decades. If you do a lot of editing, and certainly programming, you quickly chafe at the lack of a Delete key. I've been using Karabiner on the Mac to remap F12 to be Delete, losing the Volume-up control in the process. Annoying, but worth it.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- Tagbert 4y ago
  Or File/Quit which is the explicit way to quit an app.

ace2358 4y ago

Interesting app, curious what the use case is? Mac OS has always been good at managing resources for background apps (in my experience). I don’t mind if I have some extra open apps. I think I even have the setting activated that hides the ‘dot’ to show ‘running’ apps. Honestly, if you look in activity monitor there are over a hundred apps running without any windows being rendered. Maybe it’s because I’ve always had more ram than I need?

kome 4y ago
> Interesting app, curious what the use case is? I guess windows users?
DangitBobby 4y ago
I don't love having to right-click quit applications that are inexplicably still cluttering my dock after having closed all the windows.
- jb1991 4y ago
  I just command-Q when I’m in an app if I want to just shut it down completely. One step, no right clicking nonsense.
  - webmobdev 4y ago
    What's the point of a GUI OS then? Let's get rid of the mouse and trackpad too ...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - jachee 4y ago
      What’s the point of a keyboard in a GUI OS, then? You can just copy/paste any text you need. Just because you can stand on your right leg doesn’t mean your left leg is useless. Learning to work with keyboard shortcuts together with your point-and-click skills will make you more efficient.

barryvan 4y ago

What a great little utility -- part of my growing collection of tools to make MacOS behave more reasonably, or at least more in line with my particular expectations (which, yes, in many cases means more like Windows). I think that part of the appeal of an app like this is about keeping things "tidy". MacOS seems to be built around making it easy to clutter -- lots of randomly sized overlapping windows (resolved using Rectangle for Aero-snap like functionality -- the weird full-screen split-screen nonsense in MacOS is just frustratingly limited and slow and has too many animations and transitions to be useful), dozens of apps filling up the dock, six hundred icons in the menu bar (which I use vanilla.app to resolve), and so on. I think my mental model distinguishes between applications and utilities. Utilities are effectively like the old TSR tools -- you start them, then they just run quietly in the background until you need them, with no interface. Applications, by contrast, _are_ their interface, so it feels strange that when I close that interface, the application itself isn't closed. This utility alters the behaviour of the OS so that it conforms to this mental model. I suspect that this is a situation where there's no "right" approach, but rather a set of preferences and learned behaviours.

jb1991 4y ago
On Mac I usually just double click somewhere in the title bar on a window to make it automatically size to fill up the whole screen, seems to work like a charm every time. Note, I’m not talking about the full screen mode which is something different.
- barryvan 4y ago
  I do use that, but I find that it's inconsistent. From what I can tell, it seems to toggle between the current size and the previous size -- which becomes problematic when using an external screen. Or perhaps that's just Finder -- it's hard to tell! Frustratingly, this matches the behaviour of alt-clicking (sorry, option-clicking) on the maximise button, and I really love being able to have two windows comfortably share a screen with no wasted space, aero-snap style.
  - jb1991 4y ago

vmladenov 4y ago

This is an interesting app in terms of illuminating expectations of different user groups. Back in 2010 when I got my first MacBook, the app not closing when the window closed was alien to me as someone who had only ever used Windows. But that discomfort only lasted a few months, and I grew to strongly prefer the distinction of “this app is running” and “this app is has a window open” + value the difference between Cmd-Q and Cmd-W. I remember one OS update made the app closing behavior the default, and I had to go learn where the setting was to undo it; a subsequent OS backtracked on that. The distinction is less meaningful these days with NVME making apps launch much faster than spinning 2.5” drives, but stuff like Photoshop still has a long startup time.

BuckyBeaver 4y ago
Why do you prefer having an app running (and owning the sole menu bar) when it has no GUI on screen? I switched to Mac 20 years ago (when I started a decade-long stint as software engineer at Apple), and I still DETEST this behavior. Why the hell do I want some application that I just "closed" to continue owning the menu? Of course, this indicts the Mac's single menu bar, glued to the top of the screen. That mistake should have been fixed with the transition to OS X, but nope. A related issue is Apple's half-assed implementation of Alt-Tab-style app switching. I was pretty impressed that they added this Windows-style feature, but less so after finding that it doesn't restore minimized apps. Again, why do I want to switch back to an app but not restore its UI? Fortunately there's a utility for that: Alt-Tab. https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app It can also create a window for applications that lack them when you switch to them; this is a huge boon for Finder.
- scoopr 4y ago
  If its a app with a document model, it kinda has to? You close a word document, and then open another (through menu item), it shouldn't close the app in between. Also its not uncommon for me to close all the browser windows but leave the browser running, so that I can easily cmd-tab there and open new window. Yes, you can kind of workaround with some MDI style window, which you then would have to hide when not wanting to quit, but feels a bit unnecessary. In the category of "single window apps", I wouldn't want my music to stop playing just because the gui of spotify is not visible. Granted, Hide might be a better option than closing the window, depending on if the app being active is useful without the gui. With spotify in particular, I would expect space to act as a play/pause even without gui visible, though annoyingly it seems they have not implemented it like that (apple music does).

eyelidlessness 4y ago

I very explicitly do not want this functionality but I’m glad someone made it for people who do!

vletal 4y ago

I can see this being useful for old MacBooks with little RAM but I'd never used it. Closed apps running in background are like services. I do not need the window to be rendered in the background for messages or chat apps. I open them only when needed. Or having a large-ish apps I use on daily basis preloaded in compressed memory. It's just a sensible workflow.

mvac 4y ago

I recommend adding Mail and Calendar to exclusions, as these app do not sync when not running. Also there are few really annoying bugs that makes the app almost unusable: https://github.com/onebadidea/swiftquit/issues/1 https://github.com/onebadidea/swiftquit/issues/1

radley 4y ago

I use Quitter by Marco: https://marco.org/apps https://marco.org/apps I have a few dozen apps set to quit after specific periods of time. This allows me to run/resume certain apps for a few hours (VLC, Figma), while others shut down only 10 minutes after I use them (Messages, Calculator).

nicky0 4y ago

Is it called Swift Quit because it closes apps swiftly, or because it is written in Swift? Or maybe both.

madeofpalk 4y ago

Whether this app is for you or not, it must be appreciated that this is possible, and is what will distinguish 'real computers' from toy devices like iPad. There was a time where Apple was trying to make iOS/iPad the future of (Apple) computing, but it could just never happen partly because while Apple may have lowered the floor on ease-of-use, they also significantly lowered the ceiling of functionality compared to macOS (or Windows). Completely eliminated the long-tail of possibility that people use Real Computers for. iPads now have the same CPU as some Mac computers, yet they're still significantly held back by software limitations (and have been pretty much since day one).

wil421 4y ago
They dumb down iPads for the same reason they don’t allow a multiuser experience on iPad. They want you to buy another iPad or if you want a more capable device a Mac.
atchoo 4y ago
I think there is still cause for worry. Listening to John Siracusa talk about creating such utilities and it's a story of ever decreasing API features making tasks like interrogating and controlling the OS or other apps increasingly hard especially if you want to be blessed by inclusion in the platform app store. It's super risky to invest your time/money creating an app like this because the chance it is broken in the next OS update is so high. I fully agree that it's what makes computers special and I am very frustrated by "security" being the reason I can't make the computer behave as I wish. So many 3rd party fixes or innovative ideas (e.g. industry changing game mods) wouldn't have happened without malware like tactics of patching dlls which I believe every OS vendor would like to make forever impossible. Safe computing is essential but not at the cost of killing the golden goose of general purpose computing with full user control. I wish the focus was more on transparency and control of what software is doing on a system and not cutting it's legs off.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cdevroe 4y ago

Umm, no.

jmbwell 4y ago

Why does installing this app require sidestepping Gatekeeper? That’s kind of a smell.

alin23 4y ago
Most likely because the dev isn't paying $100/year to Apple to get a signing certificate and access to notarization.
- hk1337 4y ago
  $100 can be a lot but it's not $100/app/year, right? For $100/year you could have several applications?
  - pyro2927 4y ago
    Yes, but this might be their only app.
  - alin23 4y ago
    It's $100/year for enrolling in the Apple Developer Program (number of apps doesn't matter): https://developer.apple.com/programs/ https://developer.apple.com/programs/ It's not a lot given what you get for the money (easy app publishing on the App Store, call support with Apple engineers etc.). But SwiftQuit's dev doesn't make money with the app so he didn't see the need to pay that money just to sign the app. An unsigned app downloaded from the dev's website is as good as a signed one.

tqwhite 4y ago

I have used Macintoshes since 1984 and I never once even noticed this dichotomy. When I looked at this app, I thought, "Huh? Why would I care about that?" I literally never once considered the accumulation of open apps to be any sort of inconvenience. Having it brought up, I realize that land on the pro-Mac-style side of the conversation. When I have used Windows (and it's a fair amount), I am often annoyed to have an app that I thought was in the Taskbar gone. The cognitive step of thinking it was there, looking for it, seeing it gone, realizing I closed its last window and hunting it down in the (still appalling) Start Menu is distracting. I consider it to be another example of my long held belief that Microsoft never, ever chosen the right alternative in any esthetic decision in its UI.

the_gipsy 4y ago
When I close an app, I want it closed, not in standby or running background tasks.
- tescocles 4y ago
  ...close the app then? It's just a different paradigm. It's not like quitting the app is in any way difficult (it's just cmd+Q which I actually find a bit too easy to trigger by accident sometimes), it's just Macs don't consider an app to be the sum of its windows.
  - blacksmith_tb 4y ago
    Sure, it's not hard to hit cmd-q instead of cmd-w, I think the general question is "what's the benefit to me, the user, of having an app still running (and in memory, until it gets paged out to disk) without any windows open?" Obviously there are some kinds of apps that it makes sense to have running in the background all the time, but we're talking about text or image editors, say. I find it to be sort of annoying.
    - Tagbert 4y ago
      For document apps, the idea is that you are working on a document. You can then close that document and open another document without the app closing when you close the first document. It’s not really about having apps running in the background. It’s just a slightly different way to look at documents and apps.

Alifatisk 4y ago

Why is this not the default behaviour!?

Tagbert 4y ago
Because Mac users close their apps when they are done with them. If you have an app that with windows for things like documents, images, etc. When you finish one document and want to open a different document or create a new one, why should closing your first window also close the app. Do you then need to reopen the app to open the next document? In Windows the window is the app. In Mac OS, the apps have windows. It’s just a different way of looking at things.

w10-1 4y ago

Who among you can verify this isn't a huge gaping hack hole? 1. Never validated by Apple 2. Requires disabling Gatekeeper 3. Permitted to run silently in the background 4. Permitted to control any other application How would you check that even building it could run something you don't want on your computer? And if running it exposes a trojan? After all, it's the only app from user "onebadidea" on github. Please be good consumers...

readonthegoapp 4y ago

pretty awesome that someone made this. i used to think macos was was simpler than windows, but this type of 'feature' was just one of many that made me think, 'no - it was just marketing'.