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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

I'm of two minds.

On the one hand, the OP reminds me of the people who were complaining about Microsoft killing firewall vendors by including basic security features in the OS -- you should expect to be destroyed if your entire business model is dependent on the elephant sleeping peacefully on one side of the cage.

On the other hand, Apple isn't creating an ecosystem with the iPhone, so much as a different type of cage. If you play by their rules, you're extremely susceptible to being squished when the elephant gets restless.

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> a different type of cage.

Exactly. Many people here may be too young to recall the late 80ies, but Apple were the ones who wanted to control the operating system and the hardware, whereas Microsoft settled for "just" the OS and open hardware. Remember the Apple "look and feel" lawsuit?

They make great products, but as a developer, I'm not sure I trust them a whole lot more than Microsoft.

> Remember the Apple "look and feel" lawsuit?

A remnant of that issue may be present on your desktop. I believe this works on Windows XP and it should also work on Windows Vista. Select a window. Press Alt and release. Press Space and release. The menu that is revealed is to sidestep Apple's single click window closing patent which was filed circa 1984.

How dare you accuse me of using a Windows desktop! :-)

I'm not afraid to say that i'm using Windows XP. :-)

But i don't see how this behaviour is related to a single click patent. Btw. it doesn't work with Firefox.

You are supposed to keep ALT down when you press space.

Actually, you don't need to with MS apps, but doing so allows it to work with FF also.

That's right. I have Alt+Space mapped to Launchy so i didn't test that.

It could have been expensive for Microsoft to license single click window closing on a per copy basis and it could have set an expensive precedent. So, they devised numerous methods of closing a window without infringing on the patent. One method was to open a menu on the top left corner of a window, and with or without a second click, selecting the window close item. Another method selects the same menu item by using keyboard sequences. However, no method allowed you to close a window by using a single mouse click.

After the patent expired, the keyboard sequences were retained for power users who were already familiar with the sequences. However, the prominance of the menu has declined.

> it doesn't work on Firefox

I'm not surprised. Firefox on Windows implements its own menu primitives. Many other applications have different versions of the same libraries statically compiled. Obviously, the Firefox implementation doesn't implement a legacy window.

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