

Dear Apple, Please Make Up Your Mind - acolombi

Dear Apple,<p>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.
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djrogers
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/](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.

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27182818284
I can't think of a time when using my Mac that this has been an issue. I
frequently have Preview and Quicktime open but without documents as well. Same
goes for Firefox being there, but not with a current window.

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ratfacemcgee
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.

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damm
Amen

