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Comment by bjtitus | Hacker News Reader

Why are you talking about not having to quit apps? Lion still has the concept of quitting apps versus closing windows. Are you just talking about iOS or am I missing something?

I actually think the handling of background apps running state handling would be one of the best things to port from iOS to Mac. There are obvious large hurdles, though.

--EDIT-- I guess you're talking about resume but the issue is having apps still running after all windows are closed. I see people who leave all office applications open just because they were working on a document, spreadsheet, and slideshow in the last week. Apple needs to encourage more developers to focus on quick launch times and quitting applications like the App Store does when windows are closed.

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Lion actually adds some APIs so developers can make their apps work like iOS apps. If the developer allows, the OS can kill their app at any time when it's in the background. More info here: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.a...

Thanks for the info! Definitely did not know this was a new feature. It just seemed to me like applications doing this were checking for window closed events, finishing up any work, and then closing as soon as possible. I hope more Mac OS developers take advantage of this but I fear it will be seldom used.

Nothing like a little encouragement for adopting this feature as a condition of being accepted in the Mac App Store to drive system feature adoption.

There are new APIs in Lion that enable the system to automatically quit applications if they're not needed at the moment. Pretty much like iOS.

Lion still has the concept (as does iOS), except it's rendered effectively useless by the new Automatic Termination feature and the correspoding quick state restore, which is very close to what iOS does. Also, Lion hides the 'open app' indicator by default for new installs, so beginner users have even fewer hints at the concept of quitting an app.

according to the siracusa review, lion works more like iOS, in that the OS can reclaim resources from 'open' apps, and sometimes leaves processes open for a short time after they are closed. I think this is what was meant about not quitting apps, the concept is still there, but not really needed like it was previously.

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