What a program should do when you close it

Overall I really like my Mac and OSX. Stable, easy to use, works, and visually pleasing are some of the words I would use to describe it.

But…every now and then I get really annoyed with it. When I click on the red X in the corner of a window, I expect that to stop the application and unload it from memory. Most Mac apps do not do this however, they kill off the window, but keep the process running in memory as witnessed in the Activity Monitor and the icon on the Dock. This of course means that there is that much less resources are available for other applications which means the system runs slower as it swaps out memory from disk.

And to further annoy me, not all Apple apps do this. Some (like the calculator) do actually exit when you click on the red X. That bugs me because it means that things are not being implemented consistently in the background (at Apple). If one app does something one way, why don’t all of the apps from that vendor do it that way?

Don’t even get me started on the “Maximize” button on the iTunes window and how it “minimizes” the app. Grrrr….