automatic termins-mission
Matt Neuburg’s post expressing frustration at OS X Lion’s Automatic Termination (John Siracusa explains) is well-reasoned, and correct. Lion is behaving badly.
I’m honestly not sure what to think about Lion’s Machiavellian Automatic Transmission push these days. But just to play devil’s advocate for a moment:
What if Lion’s problem is actually that it hasn’t enforced its dictatorship enough?
I agree that Lion’s decision to take the reigns, terminate TextEdit unasked (though only kind’ve), and remove it from the alt-tab UI and dock is over-reaching… But maybe instead of throwing the whole idea out, Apple needs to push the UI farther.
Ever since it was introduced by Windows 3.0, alt-tab has been used to cycle through open applications. iOS’ version of a task switcher flipped the script, instead showing us recently-used applications, open or not. It seems to me that if the command-tab interface were updated to show those applications that were recently used, it wouldn’t matter to the user whether Lion in fact had them in memory at the moment. Command-tabbing to TextEdit would simply ‘re-open’ the program, lickety-split — with everything as it was when it was terminated. It would feel as though the user had ‘switched’ back.
(Of course, this introduces new questions: What trigger, aside from a manual Quit command, would remove an application from the alt-tab interface? At what point, if ever, would a hibernating application disappear from Mission Control?)
Lion is a transitional OS, firmly planted between Apple’s past and its future. We see this in other awkward Lion moments: pages in Safari move with the user’s gesture, while system preferences panes are still navigable using in the old “Leftward Swipe Mean Backwards” abstraction.
Could this be a similarly half-baked implementation that will make better sense as Apple more firmly asserts its unibody aluminum fist?