Is it possible to disable the auto quit of preview and other apps?

Question

Is it possible to disable the auto quit of preview and other apps?

This "Apple thinking for me" has got to stop. Does anyone know how to disable the auto quitting of apps after the last doc is closed and another app is clicked on?

I know it happens in Preview and it's terribly annoying since you can't turn it off.

Anyone?

Lion bothers me severely.

Even went to the Apple Store to buy another copy of Snow Leopard so I can revert back and they don't carry it any more.

This is an infuriating operating system.

Mac OS X (10.7), Mail app

Posted on Aug 2, 2011 10:33 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Francine Schwieder

Level 6

19,070 points

Aug 2, 2011 12:27 PM in response to Alex Zavatone

Unfortunately this behavior is the new Apple recommended normal and expected behavior, according to Apple's own Human Interface Quidelines:

In general, quit when users close the last open window in your app. In apps that are not document-based, users generally expect the app to quit when they close the main window. If an app continues to perform some function when the main window is closed, it might be appropriate to leave it running after the user closes the main window. For example, iTunes continues to play after the user closes the main window. If users close the last remaining document window in a document-based app and switch to another app, it’s appropriate to quit the app.

Currently the applications that are showing this behavior are Preview, TextEdit, and QuickTime Player X. There may be others, and there will certainly be more in the future, if the above recommendation means anything.

For the morbidly curious, the whole PDF is here:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual /AppleHIGuidelines/Intro/Intro.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000894-TP6

And I don't much like it either.

Francine

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Answer 2

Aug 2, 2011 5:34 PM in response to Francine Schwieder

****, I hate this garbage where Apple tries to do too much thinking for us.

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Answer 3

parna

Level 2

295 points

Aug 3, 2011 2:30 AM in response to Alex Zavatone

Alex wrote

****, I hate this garbage where Apple tries to do too much thinking for us.

I have been thinking this too. Shades of some other company famous for its paper clip, etc etc??

With Steve mostly out of the pic, I have grave fears for the future of the Mac. Awful graphics in iCal and Address Book, boring startup screen, and the most complicated saving I have ever come across. I am still trying to figure out all the ins and outs of it (and I ran a school network for 8 years). My sister who is absolutely hopeless on a computer to start with, hasn't got a hope of understanding this. It is just going to cause kaos.

Sister "Has it been saved?"

Me "Yes."

Sister "But I didn't want to save that. I was just looking"

Me "Well you can go back into here and revert to this, see there is this version and this one and this one ... see, Apple has done all this for you so you can keep every thing that ever happens on your computer. Good of them huh?"

SIster "But I just want to be able to save when I want to, like I did with my other computer (Windoze)."

Why is it like this - I suspect it has a lot to do with their upcoming iCloud plans, and shooting documents into the clouds.

Forcing everyone into the one straight jacket is only going to get up peoples noses.

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Answer 4

Jan 21, 2012 8:23 AM in response to parna

EXACTLY Parna. It's like that insipid paperclip.

I an others (who were former Apple engineers) have grave fears for the future of the Mac.

Your case of auto save is another example of terrible, terrible judgement.

Incorporating SVN actually INTO the file system is scary at best, but when I have Illustrator and Photoshop files of the 20 and 60 MB size, this ends up with massive file size bloating up my HD.

And if SVN is incorporated in to the file system, how can you turn it off when you want to administer your own SVN repository.

Saving everything be default is insane. The fact that Apple decision makers thought this was a god idea and good design shows that the corporate vision is defective at the top of the orgs.

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Answer 5

Jan 21, 2012 9:28 AM in response to parna

Parna, here is some information I collected for you from Apple on this issue:

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/General/Conceptual/MOSXAppP rogrammingGuide/MOSXAppProgrammingGuide.pdf

Search for "Automatic and Sudden Termination of Apps Improve the User Experience"

But here is the text:

In Mac OS X v10.7 and later, the use of the Quit command to terminate an app is diminished in favor of more user-centric techniques. Specifically, Cocoa supports two techniques that make the termination of an app transparent and fast:

Automatic termination eliminates the need for users to quit an app. Instead, the system manages app termination transparently behind the scenes, terminating apps that are not in use to reclaim needed resources such as memory.
Sudden termination allows the system to kill an app’s process immediately without waiting for it to perform any final actions. The system uses this technique to improve the speed of operations such as logging out of, restarting, or shutting down the computer.

Automatic termination and sudden termination are independent techniques, although both are designed to improve the user experience of app termination. Although Apple recommends that apps support both, an app can support one technique and not the other. Apps that support both techniques can be terminated by the system without the app being involved at all. On the other hand, if an app supports sudden termination but not automatic termination, then it must be sent a Quit event, which it needs to process without displaying any user interface dialogs.

Automatic termination transfers the job of managing processes from the user to the system, which is better equipped to handle the job. Users do not need to manage processes manually anyway. All they really need is to run apps and have those apps available when they need them. Automatic termination makes that possible while ensuring that system performance is not adversely affected.

Apps must opt in to both automatic termination and sudden termination and implement appropriate support for them. In both cases, the app must ensure that any user data is saved well before termination can happen. And because the user does not quit an autoterminable app, such an app should also save the state of its user interface using the built-in Cocoa support. Saving and restoring the interface state provides the user with a sense of continuity between app launches.

For information on how to support for automatic termination in your app, see “Automatic Termination.” For information on how to support sudden termination, see “Sudden Termination.”

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Answer 6

WarrenO

Level 1

72 points

Feb 7, 2012 3:05 PM in response to Alex Zavatone

Good heavens, Zav. Small bloody planet.

For what it's worth, I have exactly the same problems and complaint. Apparently no solutions yet, either.

You've probably also discovered that OSX 'helpfully' relaunches programs for you that were running when last you shut down. For that, I managed to hack a script that more or less overrides that behavior:

http://indigestible.nightwares.com/2011/08/26/kill-all-programs-before-shutting- down-osx-10-7-lion/

...but for this auto-quit thing, nothing yet. Bizarre - programs quit when we don't want them to, and load when we don't want them to. One simple toggle in the General settings would be enough: 'Make it like it used to be in OSX 6'.

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Answer 7

Feb 7, 2012 3:45 PM in response to WarrenO

Ockrassa?

Well, I like to say, big world, small circles.

Yes, I see absolutely nothing useful about this decision and many things about it that are detrimental to the user experience.. The app is still running, the GUI is not enabled. The reason this is supposed to be a good thing is so that "the app launches faster" the next time the user needs it. Well, make it happen on an explicit quit, do not quit the app without the user's permission when the machine is not in a low memory situation. The OS is trying to outguess the user while the previous default user condition was to use the GUI to nav back to an open file since the ap was still open. This is 10 levels of dumb and conflicts with established default behaviour of the OS.

It is the multitude of decisions like this in the OS that make Lion a usability disaster to me, the seasoned user. "Think Different" should not mean "Think Stupid".

I'm tempted to install Lion and Xcode on a spare drive just to check through the foundation class header files to see if there is something that can be overridden, but there are vast amounts of other things I could be doing with my time.

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Answer 8

WarrenO

Level 1

72 points

Feb 8, 2012 1:47 PM in response to Alex Zavatone

Aye, tis I. Autoquit and auto-resume (as well as that launcher thing) are parts of a larger goal, I think - to merge iOS and OSX into one entity. So I have a feeling we'll be seeing similarly goofy ideas coming from Apple for a while yet.

What I'd really like to see - and what I've left in Apple's dropbox - is a way for users to override this behavior, such as a system preference that disables autoquit. Autoquit is fine if you're on a tablet, but when your machine has 8 GB of RAM, you don't need the OS deciding to quit the program because of 'memory' concerns. It really needs to be up to the user to make those choices, not the OS. You and I are on the same page here.

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Answer 9

cdevers

Level 1

4 points

Mar 26, 2012 4:05 PM in response to Alex Zavatone

I've had Lion on my laptop for a day and I already hate it, mostly due to this "feature" and the way it keeps killing processes with network connections (SSH, VNC, etc). The problem isn't just with TextEdit and Preview, the way some of the discussion (e.g. on TidBits) says, but with any processes, including command line tools. I tend to leave long-running programs open for days or weeks at a time, and under Lion I can't trust them to be there when I come back to that window. This is unbelievably frustrating.

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Answer 10

petermac87

Level 5

7,447 points

Mar 26, 2012 4:16 PM in response to cdevers

cdevers wrote:

I've had Lion on my laptop for a day and I already hate it, mostly due to this "feature" and the way it keeps killing processes with network connections (SSH, VNC, etc). The problem isn't just with TextEdit and Preview, the way some of the discussion (e.g. on TidBits) says, but with any processes, including command line tools. I tend to leave long-running programs open for days or weeks at a time, and under Lion I can't trust them to be there when I come back to that window. This is unbelievably frustrating.

Good to see you are giving it time to get used to it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Lion. Mountain Lion is due out soon, something that most people in this very old thread would not have known when posting here. Nothing will be going 'backwards' in ML as most people, as per usual, have become very familiar with the GUI of Lion except some who refuse to acknowledge change.

So the best I can advise is to completely wipe your harddrive and reinstall from the Snow Leopard Backup you made yesterday and stick with Snow leopard until you feel comfortable in handling the new systems.

Good Luck

Pete

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Answer 11

WarrenO

Level 1

72 points

Mar 26, 2012 6:46 PM in response to petermac87

You know, if you have nothing productive to offer to the discusison, you don't have to post anything at all.

Not all decisions made by Apple, in the arena of UI or anywhere else, are necessarily good ones. It has nothing to do with 'refus[ing] to acknowledge change' - cdevers's point is a valid one.

If you have suggestions for ways that command-line processes can be kept alive in terminal sessions that get auto-quit, feel free to offer them. Otherwise keep your smug comments to yourself.

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Answer 12

petermac87

Level 5

7,447 points

Mar 26, 2012 6:49 PM in response to WarrenO

Sorry, I do not recall responding to you.

Good luck

Pete

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Answer 13

Shootist007

Level 6

16,709 points

Mar 26, 2012 6:54 PM in response to Alex Zavatone

Alex Zavatone wrote:

****, I hate this garbage where Apple tries to do too much thinking for us.

Personally coming from and still using Windows on most computers the whole idea of a Program (App) staying open when you close the last open windows is IMHO just ridiculous. If I want the program open I have a windows open for it. If I need to get to my desktop for some reason I can minimize the windows. Why would anyone want to leave a program open with NO windows open. Just stupid.

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Answer 14

Mar 26, 2012 6:57 PM in response to cdevers

Yep. It sompletely screws with how long time Apple users use the programs and the OS.

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Answer 15

petermac87

Level 5

7,447 points

Mar 26, 2012 7:01 PM in response to Alex Zavatone

True but not for recent converts to Apple which is a Hugh market these days with iPhone and iPad integration, so they are not going to continue to give their main focus to old users who will start dying out. Not good business.

Pete

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