That’s it, we’re quitting • Hacker News Board

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#21

Post by stewbrew » Sat, Mar 26, 2011, 4:15 PM UTC

This looked like an interesting read. But then they mentioned Rhythmbox and I remembered the one thing I hate about that player: that stupid icon that stubbornly stays there in the notification area even if I don't want to listen to music any longer.

I think you could easily make the opposite point: With slower media (floppy disk, slower hard disks etc.) starting an app was costly. This is why people tried to avoid quitting an app just to select a file. Today hard disks (especially SSDs) are fast. Quitting and starting an app is rather cheap. (With the exception of those commercial apps that try hard to make you feel that they were worth the money.) I thus would like to propose to get rid of all those "Open file" dialogs. In the age of multitasking, they are an obvious case of cargo cult.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#22

Post by DanI-S » Sat, Mar 26, 2011, 4:20 PM UTC

bmelton wrote: post #2

I'm certainly impressed that the Canonical team are thinking about UI issues in this much depth. It is admittedly FAR more thought than I've ever given to the 'Quit' command, ever. And while my initial thought is that there are much more important UI/UX issues to be solved in Ubuntu before this, I think that thinking of things like this are key in fixing the global UI altogether. I'm not entirely certain of whether o…

I feel the same way as you do - I like to feel my system is clean and uncluttered. However, I still agree with their thoughts.

We may like quitting applications, but realistically, memory/CPU management is something that can and should be handled by the OS. It's an overhead on the user's mind that can be dealt with perfectly well by clever automation. It should keep itself clean without needing our help.

A kid growing up in a world without the 'quit' button would not feel anything is missing; we've just been conditioned by the creaky operating systems of our own youth.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#23

Post by kristofferR » Sat, Mar 26, 2011, 4:21 PM UTC

We killed their server.

There's a cache here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KY4Mjyl...

I'm not sure if any there was any images in the post.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#24

Post by dman » Sat, Mar 26, 2011, 4:22 PM UTC

a) Does this mean ubuntu will be patching each and every application in synaptic to follow this new paradigm? b) Isnt an explicit action more favorable over an implicit action? ie a direct mapping between what the user is doing and what happens with system resources. c) How do you close emacs with 25 buffers or browsers with 20 tabs in this new world?

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#25

Post by tszming » Sat, Mar 26, 2011, 4:23 PM UTC

>> Phone and tablet operating systems, such as Android and iOS, have abolished the ideas of “quitting” or even “closing” applications altogether.

Try to Google "android task killer" to see what users need.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#26

Post by zephjc » Sat, Mar 26, 2011, 4:28 PM UTC

jontas wrote: post #8

joaquin_win wrote: post #4

It seems to be down, google cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KY4Mjyl...

I thought the down website was related to the headline..

"That's it, we're quitting.

Sincerely, The Canonical database servers"

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#27

Post by vytis » Sat, Mar 26, 2011, 4:38 PM UTC

extension wrote: post #15

vytis wrote: post #11

I guess the next one in line should be getting rid of file as a concept. Not much point knowing where exactly the song you want to listen or a movie you want to play is stored.

Depends what you mean by "where". With respect to finding it amongst other files, making it available on portable devices, sharing it (or NOT sharing it) with others, "where" is very important to the user. What we really want is the user's concept of a file decoupled from the system's concept, and then cleansed of various baggage from the prior coupling. That's very different than making it a system concept exclusive…

I meant from a user's perspective. You shouldn't care if the song is stored in /foo/bar or in a remote database somewhere in the cloud. You access it through some obvious interface e.g. iTunes. Having 'file' as a central concept of accessing data doesn't have much connection to the actual way it is used. My vim config file doesn't have much in common with a song I've just downloaded. It is stored the same way, but that's about it.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#28

Post by rbarooah » Sat, Mar 26, 2011, 4:39 PM UTC

With all the acknowledgement of Apple's role on the history of this, I have to wonder whether they are aware that Apple has been laying the groundwork for doing the same thing since Snow Leopard, and that Lion can already automatically quit and even pre-start applications without the user's involvement.

That said, I suspect Apple will keep the "quit" menu item even if it's not necessary for at least one version so that people have a chance to learn that it isn't necessary without being freaked out by it's sudden disappearance.

Also, although app developers have been encouraged to adopt to the new conventions, there will be plenty of legacy apps that don't for some time to come.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#29

Post by marshray » Sat, Mar 26, 2011, 4:51 PM UTC

A document you 'close', an application you 'exit' or 'quit'. The document-centric people have been trying to do away with applications since the the beginning of GUIs.

It reality, the document metaphor works great for a few things that resemble documents. But documents are as much an artifact of the paper-handling wold as processess login sessions are to the electronic world. Are they really more fundamental than, say, a stapler? Is a stapler worthy of being a fundamental pervasive metaphor for interaction?

Games? Videos? Terminal windows? Phone calls? Desktop sharing? Text and IM? Many of the things we do with computers have little to do with documents.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#30

Post by silentbicycle » Sat, Mar 26, 2011, 4:57 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #20

"A few behemoth applications, such as LibreOffice and Gimp, still keep “Quit” separate from “Close” for the original reason — to save you from having to wait for the application to relaunch after closing its only document. But that is fixable, and all other applications have become fast enough that they don’t need it any more. After all, they’re running on hardware that is hundreds of times faster than it was in 1984…

While CPUs have gotten much faster (60%/year), memory hasn't kept up (barely 10%/year). Most programs spend much of their time moving data around in memory, because common programming styles lead to data that is extremely fragmented (poor locality) - memory is the bottleneck, not processor speeds.

http://seven-degrees-of-freedom.blogspot.com/2009/10/latency...