Re: [Usability]Keeping the Quit menu item



On Wed, 2003-03-19 at 16:41, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> The user model for "Quit" involves the idea of a process. If you don't
> know what a process is, you can't understand what that menu item does.

No, this is wrong.  "Quit" involves the idea of an application, not of a
process.  "Quit" means "quit the application", not "quit the process". 
In most cases it's the same thing, but the user doesn't care.  He just
wants to quit the application -- i.e. "Evolution" vs.
"/usr/bin/evolution".

> A web browser could easily work either way as well, right now they all
> work like "factory mode" but there's not any special reason why, other
> than efficiency. If an app was fast and small enough it could easily
> just start a new instance for each window for robustness reasons.

How many processes an application is made of is irrelevant.

What is relevant is whether you want to expose an app-based model like
on the Mac (you launch an application, and you only have one instance of
that application on your desktop at any given time), or a document-based
model (you have multiple windows, each of which contains a document). 
In the first case you want "Quit", in the second you don't.

There are pros and cons to both approaches, but this is the decision
that matters, not whether you want to expose the concept of processes or
not.

And right now GNOME is kind of in between, because while it doesn't have
the strong application-oriented behavior that the Mac has, it still does
things like grouping windows by application in the task bar.  So "Quit"
still makes sense, since it refers to a concept that is exposed in the
UI.

> It only makes sense that if you close a main window, its dialogs and
> toolboxes will close also, so you don't need Quit for that.

BTW configuration dialogs are another example of the "application"
concept being exposed in the GUI; when you open a settings dialog from a
window, its settings can affect the whole app, not just the window that
popped up the dialog.

> Basically, if you can't explain the Quit menu item without invoking
> the idea of a process, then you can't explain the Quit menu item at
> all, because processes are not in the user model.

But "Quit" refers to the application, not the process, and the
application is in the user model.

-- Ettore

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