Re: [Usability]Keeping the Quit menu item

[Wesley Leggette <wleggette gate net>]

On Wed, 2003-03-19 at 16:21, Ettore Perazzoli wrote:
> 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

This is all true, but I would like to point out that while OS X does
have a strong application oriented interface (which I think is good), it
also focuses on windows (hence the two sides of the dock). I think this
is good because it allows users to easily interact with two useful
models at the same time.


-- 
Wesley Leggette <wleggette gate net>