Quitting with the close box on Mac

[Kay C Lan]

On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 10:39 AM, Peter M. Brigham <pmbrig at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Another reason for me to delay running Mavericks as long as I possibly can. Is this true for apps like Word and TextEdit, too??? If so, my motivation is further reinforced. What the hell is Apple thinking of, changing its longstanding GUI conventions???
>

There may be other reasons* not to upgrade to Mavericks, but this may
not be one of them.

On my 10.9.3 a slew of Apple and non-Apple apps all remain open after
I've closed the last window. The one's that do auto-close seem to be
sensible ones: System Preferences for many versions of OS X has
auto-closed when the window was closed, now Contacts and Reminders
does the same - I can live with that. On my Mac the vast majority of
apps remain open when the last window is closed.

I should point out that my Mavericks set-up isn't 'typical', so maybe
that also has something to do with whether an app closes when the last
window is closed. I believe most people are now slaves to the
auto-save feature and the old black dot in the red traffic light icon
that use to indicate that your working file had unsaved changes has
been deprecated and now is only seen on 'old' apps. On my Mac I still
have the black dot in red traffic light icon for all Apple and
non-Apple apps as I do not have the auto-save feature turned On. To
turn Off Auto-Save you check the cryptically named 'Ask to keep
changes when closing documents' preference in the General pane of the
System Preferences.

*Mavericks is the most temperamental OS X I've used. I've had Finder
windows that will not come to the front, drag and drop that will not
work, when I start my Mac sometimes the Finder windows that were open
when I shutdown are there, sometimes only one, and sometimes none -
and it makes no difference if I check the box about 'Reopen windows
when logging back in' or not. Plus a few other things that seem to
suggest that Mavericks has a personality all of it's own.