One thing that is annoying is the inconsistency on the mac about whether closing a window quits the app. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. I wonder if it would make sense for apple to change the appearance of the close button slightly to give a visual cue. Maybe an extra ring around the red button to indicate that it means more than closing the window.

Apple wants normal programs to stay open and programs that are supposed to be one-shot utilities to quit.

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jbruni wrote:
One thing that is annoying is the inconsistency on the mac about whether closing a window quits the app. ...

Although I mostly agree with your assessment, there is a bit of order to the issue. For the most part, apps that are pretty much useless w/out an open window, yet boast relatively short launch times (Address Book, Sys Prefs, etc.) will quit when you close the window. Apps that take longer to launch (anything from Adobe, Microsoft, etc.) and have situations where users would want to open a recent document or navigate to a particular file, will stay open until Quit.

But having a visual clue as to what will happen isn't such a bad idea IMO. The ring you suggested, or perhaps making the red close button larger in such instances would keep things visually simple and yet add to the user interaction.

It should be noted that Windows isn't consistent in this regard, either. If you close the LAST window, the app quits, but if there are other open windows, it won't. Of course, that's the way you'd want it to be, but it's not always clear whether you have another open window, particular with the way alt-tab works on Windows.

Often, I want to close one window, then open another, and it's annoying to have the application quit on me, particularly if it takes several seconds for the application to launch.

But Windows has to operate this way, because of the foolish decision to put the menu bar in the window. They haven't come up with decent a way to provide an interface to a running application with no open document window. The horrendous MDI is an acknowledgement of the problem, but not a solution to it.

The inconsistency between the window behaviour of word & excel is more marked than any apps I've used on a mac. Excel uses a single window, multi-document approach that is restrictive in ways that annoy me every day at the office. Closing the "window" in excel attempts to close all documents...you must instead hit the smaller close button underneath the window close button if you just want to close the front-most in the stack of documents. I've lost work several times by thinking that the warning about saving was for the foremost doc. My own fault, or just a bad design?

The way I've always understood it is it's up to the programmer of the software to maintain the consistency and not the operating system.

e.g. 'cmd-H' ALWAYS hides the window in every program I've ever used....EXCEPT in Photoshop.'ctl-H' hides photoshop and that's Adobe's thing and not the Mac's problem...