You’ll remember that I discussed TinkerTool a while back as one of many ways of throwing hidden system switches through a user interface (“ Lion Frustrations? Don’t Forget TinkerTool,” 29 October 2011). (You’ll probably have to restart the computer to make the incantation take effect.) For those who tremble to approach a Terminal window, there’s even more good news. It goes like this:ĭefaults write -g NSDisableAutomaticTermination -bool yes It turns out that there’s a way to turn off automatic termination! I don’t know what wizard first unearthed it or when, though I have not found many Internet references to it older than April 2012. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to capture a screencast of that phenomenon but I assure you that it can happen.)įortunately, the intrepid discoverers of command-line incantations have not been idle. This can happen even though Xcode, during the brief time it was running, was always frontmost. In Lion, I have seen Xcode terminate itself automatically immediately after being launched - between the time when you double-click its icon in the Finder and the time when you have a chance to tell it what project to open. (The behavior of Automatic Termination can actually be even worse than I describe here. And so the user, who did not quit the application deliberately, is puzzled and annoyed, and in order to continue using this application must now search for it and relaunch it all over again. But the fact is that throughout all versions of Lion, and now in Mountain Lion, Apple has not altered this aspect of Automatic Termination’s behavior an automatically terminated application’s icon is still removed from the Dock and the Command-Tab switcher, just as it would be if the user had quit the application deliberately or the application had crashed. That might be the case, if an automatically terminated application’s icon remained in the Dock and the Command-Tab switcher, so that you could conveniently relaunch it and some have suggested that the icon’s failure in this regard was just a minor bug which Apple
The best that can be said for it is that, given the existence of additional Lion and Mountain Lion features such as Auto Save and Resume (which, together, allow an application’s state to be restored the next time it is launched), the distinction between whether an application is running or not is of diminished importance. Optimistic attempts by various Apple apologists to justify this astonishing behavior have not, in my view, met with any success. Fortunately, the ScreenFlow subprocess that records the screen does not quit!) (Actually, if you look really sharp, you’ll see that ScreenFlow has also vanished much earlier from the Dock, and is later missing from the Command-Tab switcher as well. If you look sharp, you can see it vanish from the right end of the Dock a subsequent search for it in the Command-Tab switcher also proves fruitless. Note that I have not told TextEdit to quit! All I’ve done is I then close TextEdit’s document, and switch to the Finder by clicking on the desktop. Then, using LaunchBar, I launch TextEdit and I open a new document. You’ll see me first flip through the Command-Tab switcher to reveal what applications are running - just LaunchBar, ScreenFlow, and the Finder. It’s a simple-minded screencast, but it shows plainly that Mountain Lion is still a quitter. I’ve posted a screencast that demonstrates the persistence in Mountain Lion of Lion’s quit-prone behavior. It was with bated breath that I waited to learn whether Lion’s recently released successor, 10.8 Mountain Lion, would prove to have kicked this vile habit. #1615: Why Stage Manager needs an M1 iPad, Limit IP Address Tracking problems, Citibank cryptocurrency confusionĪlmost exactly a year ago, I pointed out that Mac OS X 10.7 Lion had the habit of causing some applications to quit while you were using them (“ Lion Is a Quitter,” 5 August 2011) - a habit which, as I explained at the time, goes by the name of Automatic Termination.#1616: Explaining passkeys, Apple challenges for senior citizens, macOS 11.6.7 Big Sur fixes email attachment bug.#1617: Pages regains mail merge, HomeKit sensor improvements, keyboard flags in Monterey.
Microsoft office 2011 for mac os x lion portable#
Preview selections, portable power for a MacBook Pro