Having spent many years nursing naive users I would definitely stand by my statement!

(Best one was the lady who reported that her keyboard was on fire - when I got there I found a bit of red tinsel left over from Christmas in it.)

Ubuntu/ Gnome has System Monitor under System > Administration that let's you kill any process (roughly its equivalent of the Apple Menu).

That is much more dangerous. Force Quit only allows you to kill applications.

In reply to a post by AnotherExPipex:

Having spent many years nursing naive users I would definitely stand by my statement!

(Best one was the lady who reported that her keyboard was on fire - when I got there I found a bit of red tinsel left over from Christmas in it.)

Oh, so have I... the prize probably being a highly qualified QA engineer who took six months to discover that you could type upper case by holding the shift key down instead of CapsLock, character(s), CapsLock

But I've still got reservations about over-protective OS's/apps.

Why would you force quit it, rather than hit the very familiar cmd-Q (Force Quit puts a "Lost data" warning in front of the actual kill command - ignoring it this has identical consequences to clicking "Don't Save")?

Edited by ian_c (Wed 21-Jul-10 13:20:42)

Ubuntu/ Gnome has System Monitor under System > Administration that let's you kill any process (roughly its equivalent of the Apple Menu).

Well, I'd have said that was more directly equivalent to Task Manager in Windows or Activity Monitor in OS X than to an option on the applications menu bar.

I'll offer a friend who didn't realise that her iPhone was also a fully functional iPod...

Why would you force quit it, rather than hit the very familiar cmd-Q

You tell me. I'm the one who's arguing that the option shouldn't be there!

In reply to a post by AnotherExPipex:

Ubuntu/ Gnome has System Monitor under System > Administration that let's you kill any process (roughly its equivalent of the Apple Menu).

Well, I'd have said that was more directly equivalent to Task Manager in Windows or Activity Monitor in OS X than to an option on the applications menu bar.

It is, but in terms of user interface it is in exactly the same place as Force Quit on OSX.

Force Quit is a hand-held and heavily protected alternative to Activity Monitor/ Terminal. It gives a degree of control to the user (and gives AppleCare staff an easy to navigate to option rather than freaking "naive" users with arcana).

Given Job's well known antipathy to task managers, I suspect the UI people had to work very hard to persuade him that Force Quit was a good thing.

But I've still got reservations about over-protective OS's/apps.

I'm not sure that I would classify Windows' default behaviour of warning you before closing an application to be "over-protective"!

Given Job's well known antipathy to task managers, I suspect the UI people had to work very hard to persuade him that Force Quit was a good thing.

If so then he was right and they were wrong. Activity Monitor is the place for such an option.

But it's all just a matter of opinion and not worth getting worked up about.