from Hacker News

Dear Apple, Please Make Up Your Mind

by acolombi on 7/23/15, 12:41 AM with 3 comments

Dear Apple,

Please make up your mind on whether applications quit or remain open after all their windows are closed. Preview, QuickTime and Keynote all quit if I close all their windows and switch to another application. Safari, iTunes and Activity Monitor -- not to mention almost every other third party application -- do not. Why? Please pick one, and develop an interaction architecture that supports it.

  • by djrogers on 7/23/15, 2:27 AM

    I've got running copies of both preview and keynote open right now with no active or open documents in either.

    I think what you're seeing is not a closing-windows behavior but a memory-saving one. MacOS can and will close or suspend applications that are not actively doing anything to free up memory and CPU cycles. This is enabled by 2 features/APIs Automatic and Sudden Termination. See http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/8/ for the Full Siracusa.

    For obvious reasons, applications that properly tell the OS they are in such a state are the ones you'll most often see this behavior in, and Apple's first-party applications are written that way.

  • by ratfacemcgee on 7/23/15, 1:18 AM

    on OS X, any application that you would normally open as a side effect (opening a document, for example) will close if there is no reason for them to be open anymore. This includes pages, textedit, keynote, preview, etc. They do this because there is no reason for them to remain running if the document is closed. Typically, if you launch the application by itself and it asks you to open a document - these applications will close themselves.

    On the other hand, applications that don't need to open a document to run, or don't open as a side effect of opening a file, will remain running if the active window is closed. This includes mail, messages, finder. The user benefits from these applications running after the user has closed the active window, since the user might want to launch them again quickly.

  • by damm on 7/23/15, 1:14 AM

    Amen