unity-design team mailing list archive

["frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

100% nod and agree!

On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 05:50, Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 12:01 PM, frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx
> <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > the right-click menu in the launchers for e.g. Empathy or Transmission
> show
> > an entry labeled "Quit".
> > Clicking this item does not make the applications quit, it merely closes
> > their respective main window.
> >
> > Quit and Close should be treated in a distinctive manner, this is
> important
> > to the mental equivalent of holding on to an appliance and putting an
> > appliance back into the tool shelf.
> >
> > Does this require further discussion?
>
> There is some discussion about this in a bug report I filed a while
> ago: https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/616447
>
> It was sent to ayatana-design in January, so I'm sure someone will
> chime in about it in the future. Maybe you'd like to subscribe to that
> bug report :)
>
> And I agree "Quit" is flawed for two reasons: it doesn't quit, and the
> launcher doesn't really express application state anyway. A running
> application will disappear from the launcher when all its windows are
> closed, at which point you will be unable to "quit" it from the
> launcher. It creates false expectations, and (speaking as someone who
> once sold computers to people) those never end well.
>

this is exactly the right bug to this discussion.
I was surprised to see that there are actually diverging opinions on this
matter..

To me it is clear that quit means i want to leave something.
If a frontend window is closed, this means quit the visual part of
something, but if the frontend mentally represents an application with all
that it does, then all that it does should also quit if i say so.

If a frontend application interface has not true quit option, it should not
diguise a "close" option by calling it "quit".
This doesn't only confuse the user, it also fools developers into believing
they have already implemented the basic frontend controls correctly.