Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Resume: Give examples of when it's actually useful

baryon

baryon

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Oct 3, 2009
3,957
3,156
So far I've kept all the Lion features turned on until now, as I wanted to give the new OS a chance to convince me to drop my old habits and learn the "Lion way" of doing things.

However, as for Resume, I found myself either closing all windows before quitting apps (which is a lot of extra steps), or finding it annoying that old and unwanted windows reopen when opening a given app. For this reason, I turned the feature off.

But I'm sure Apple put that feature in for a reason, so my question is: what's the use of Resume? Why would someone want to have old documents automatically reopen?

If I'm working with Pages, the chance that I will reopen the same document I was working on yesterday is very low. I would find it easier to just go to wherever I saved the file and double click it. Even if I do want to work on the same document, I would not remember whether that was the last document I had open when I quit Pages, so choosing to just open Pages would still leave me uncertain about whether it will reopen the right document.

Can anyone give specific examples of when they have found this feature useful?
 
I think you're looking at it the wrong way. Resume is just about state preservation. Conceptually I think it makes sense, that as long as you haven't manually closed a document window, you want it to stay open, regardless of whether the app has been continually running, or has quit at some point. Once you're done with a document though, you close its window, and Resume obviously won't reopen it for you. This behavior is already useful for documents that you have given a name, since you don't have to care anymore about whether the app is still running in the background or not, but it is even more useful for documents that don't have a name or location on disk yet. Only when you close these documents do you actually have to decide whether they should be kept or discarded. But if you want to quit the app or even restart the system, you can do so without making any decisions about these documents.
 
Help me out here if you will.

I try to exclusively use Preview for working PDF at my office. Now, every time I open a new preview (with it closed btw) it opens 2 documents, the oldest one on top. I hate it.

Can I disable this alone, or system wide only?
I seem to be spending more time closing crap that opens by default then getting productive work done.

Save as, (or lack of it) has just about made me cry. How do I simply save pdf's from email attachments to my server folder for clients? I need to duplicate and burn through disk space on my MBA to save a damn file?

Some of these taken for granted simplicities of OS X have been destroyed by .7. IMO
 
tigres said:
Help me out here if you will.

I try to exclusively use Preview for working PDF at my office. Now, every time I open a new preview (with it closed btw) it opens 2 documents, the oldest one on top. I hate it.
Click to expand...

Preview is opening documents that you didn't close last time. If you're done with a document, hit command-W to close the window. It won't come back.

More generally, stop using command-Q. Use command-W instead. If Lion needs the resources of a running program with no windows, Lion will kill it.

A.
 
Alrescha said:
Preview is opening documents that you didn't close last time. If you're done with a document, hit command-W to close the window. It won't come back.

More generally, stop using command-Q. Use command-W instead. If Lion needs the resources of a running program with no windows, Lion will kill it.

A.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip.

Why did they invent cmd W.

wipe mem?
 
baryon said:
So far I've kept all the Lion features turned on until now, as I wanted to give the new OS a chance to convince me to drop my old habits and learn the "Lion way" of doing things.

However, as for Resume, I found myself either closing all windows before quitting apps (which is a lot of extra steps), or finding it annoying that old and unwanted windows reopen when opening a given app. For this reason, I turned the feature off.

But I'm sure Apple put that feature in for a reason, so my question is: what's the use of Resume? Why would someone want to have old documents automatically reopen?

If I'm working with Pages, the chance that I will reopen the same document I was working on yesterday is very low. I would find it easier to just go to wherever I saved the file and double click it. Even if I do want to work on the same document, I would not remember whether that was the last document I had open when I quit Pages, so choosing to just open Pages would still leave me uncertain about whether it will reopen the right document.

Can anyone give specific examples of when they have found this feature useful?
Click to expand...

I love the resume feature and find it extremely useful. With auto-save and resume, I never bother closing any windows that I am working on and haven't actually finished yet. So, it is pretty much always being used when I write, and I write multiple essays at a time, almost all the time. If I need to reboot, then all my essays are back to exactly where I left off. It is also very useful for my safari usage as well. It is also nice if you use Preview as a pdf reader having it re-open to where it was before. No need to scroll back to the specific page location to keep reading.

Now, you claim closing apps and quitting windows involves a lot of extra steps. That, to me, seems to be blatantly false. Prior to Lion you likely just used cmd+q to quit apps. With Lion, and mission control, the ideology, as I'm using it anyway, is rather than do cmd+q, simply get used to assigning a desktop for each app you use. Then when your done using a specific app, use cmd+w to close your window, or cmd+option+w to close all windows in a single stroke/step. There is no need to use cmd+q. Just cmd+w and go to your next app/desktop. The app will still be open in the background and use a tiny memory footprint, but that's nice because next time you need it, it'll open up in a flash. Or, if you really want to free up the memory foot print, which is likely useless for most people, hit cmd+w, or cmd+option+w, and then cmd+q (this involve one additional step which is very quick, not a whole "lot" of extra steps). The benefit of this approach, getting used to using cmd+w or cmd+option+w is when you actually can benefit from resume, it'll also still be active in the system and there for you.
 
tigres said:
Save as, (or lack of it) has just about made me cry. How do I simply save pdf's from email attachments to my server folder for clients? I need to duplicate and burn through disk space on my MBA to save a damn file?
Click to expand...

I don't understand this. When in Mail, right-clicking on an attachment gives me the exact same Save options as in Snow Leopard.

Btw, 'Duplicate' used in Preview is functionally equivalent to 'Save As...', prompting you for location as soon as you close the window. It doesn't take up any more disk space than before.

A.

ps: command-W has been around for a long time, 'close Window'.
 
tigres said:
I try to exclusively use Preview for working PDF at my office. Now, every time I open a new preview (with it closed btw) it opens 2 documents, the oldest one on top. I hate it.
Click to expand...

I figure that command-q and command-w are the same amount of effort. Use command-w to just close windows instead of complete quitting the app? Is there a need to quit the app, or are you only referring to situations where you turn off the computer with PDFs open?
 
It driven me nut when I opened a few PDFs in preview when I got Lion, I thought was a bug.

Anyway, check in Preview's Preferences.
 

Attachments

  • Preview-Preferences-General.png
    Preview-Preferences-General.png
    71.4 KB · Views: 90
tkermit said:
you don't have to care anymore about whether the app is still running in the background or not
Click to expand...

Alrescha said:
If Lion needs the resources of a running program with no windows, Lion will kill it.
Click to expand...

So OS X now works like Windows a bit, you only have to care about application windows? In Windows, if you close all the windows of an app, your app also quits, which is, I think, pretty useful most of the time.

Do apps under Lion actually quit if they have no open windows? I have not noticed this yet, but then I'm sure most apps don't support this function yet.
 
baryon said:
Do apps under Lion actually quit if they have no open windows? I have not noticed this yet, but then I'm sure most apps don't support this function yet.
Click to expand...

No, apps do not quit. It's smarter than that. Apps can tell the operating system that they aren't doing anything important and can be killed if need be. In general, the app hangs around in case you want it again.

A.
 
I think resume is only useful to those that methodically use their windows positioned in the desktop, especially when they use suite such as photoshop that have those floating panels.
 
Alrescha said:
baryon said:
Do apps under Lion actually quit if they have no open windows? I have not noticed this yet, but then I'm sure most apps don't support this function yet.
Click to expand...

No, apps do not quit. It's smarter than that. Apps can tell the operating system that they aren't doing anything important and can be killed if need be. In general, the app hangs around in case you want it again.
Click to expand...

I think you're both right in a way. When an app supports Automatic Termination there's two things that can happen:
1) An app seems to be running (glowing light in Dock & visible in app switcher) but there's no corresponding process
2) An app seems to be shut down (doesn't appear in app switcher and no glowing light either), but there's a lingering process for it

For the first one of these to happen, imagine a scenario where an app does not have any windows open that are currently visible to the user (e.g. they're hidden or in another space), the app is not running any important background operations, and it has indicated to the system, that it could safely terminate itself, if the system felt that was necessary. So in that case, a memory-constrained system might ask the app to terminate its process. But, when the user later switches back to the app, its process will automatically be restarted, and Resume will take care of returning the application to its former state.

As for the second possibility, you can easily notice this behavior with at least QT Player, TextEdit, Preview and Automator already. (Although at the moment, it seems to not necessarily work reliably). If you've opened at least one document in one of these apps, and then close all of its open windows, it looks like the app quits itself, as soon as you switch away from it. In reality, a process is kept around, that will either be re-used when the user "restarts" the app at a later point, or the process will be automatically terminated, if the system decides it should better use the memory for something else.
 
Fraaaa said:
I think resume is only useful to those that methodically use their windows positioned in the desktop, especially when they use suite such as photoshop that have those floating panels.
Click to expand...

Except that Photoshop doesn't support Resume! Maybe in the future it will, but knowing Adobe... :confused:

tkermit said:
I think you're both right in a way. When an app supports Automatic Termination there's two things that can happen:
1) An app seems to be running (glowing light in Dock & visible in app switcher) but there's no corresponding process
2) An app seems to be shut down (doesn't appear in app switcher and no glowing light either), but there's a lingering process for it

For the first one of these to happen, imagine a scenario where an app does not have any windows open that are currently visible to the user (e.g. they're hidden or in another space), the app is not running any important background operations, and it has indicated to the system, that it could safely terminate itself, if the system felt that was necessary. So in that case, a memory-constrained system might ask the app to terminate its process. But, when the user later switches back to the app, its process will automatically be restarted, and Resume will take care of returning the application to its former state.

As for the second possibility, you can easily notice this behavior with at least QT Player, TextEdit, Preview and Automator already. (Although at the moment, it seems to not necessarily work reliably). If you've opened at least one document in one of these apps, and then close all of its open windows, it looks like the app quits itself, as soon as you switch away from it. In reality, a process is kept around, that will either be re-used when the user "restarts" the app at a later point, or the process will be automatically terminated, if the system decides it should better use the memory for something else.
Click to expand...

Thanks, that sounds like a logical explanation!
 
Alrescha said:
I don't understand this. When in Mail, right-clicking on an attachment gives me the exact same Save options as in Snow Leopard.

What I mean is:
On a 6 item thread, I dont want to save the attachment, I just want to quick look or preview it. I need to scroll to the bottom of the thread to do such a thing. The paperclip item notated at the top message is not a working link, just a show of whats below. Make sense?

Btw, 'Duplicate' used in Preview is functionally equivalent to 'Save As...', prompting you for location as soon as you close the window. It doesn't take up any more disk space than before.

Well before, I was not saving previews on my machine, I was opening, and saving as ---> to my webdav server. Now, am I duplicating the preview document, and saving on my server. I.E. is Lion not keeping every document I duplicate on my drive?


A.

ps: command-W has been around for a long time, 'close Window'.
Click to expand...

I always just used cmd q; force of habit. Why is it when I open a new preview of another document by the same person via e-mail, does it re-open the last one, on top of the changed one they sent me.

For example:

Company sends me a pdf.
i preview, and instruct for corrections.

cmd. q.

Company sends me corrected one (same file name)
I preview, and 2 open, the corrected one Behind the old incorrect one.

Why?
 
tigres said:
I always just used cmd q; force of habit. Why is it when I open a new preview of another document by the same person via e-mail, does it re-open the last one, on top of the changed one they sent me.

For example:

Company sends me a pdf.
i preview, and instruct for corrections.

cmd. q.

Company sends me corrected one (same file name)
I preview, and 2 open, the corrected one Behind the old incorrect one.

Why?
Click to expand...

Because you quit the app, which saves the apps state. "Quit" is essentially deprecated, you have no need to quit apps anymore!

If you want to close a document for good, just close the window! Don't worry about quitting the app!
 
I personally like the resume feature. It allows me to shut my machine down fully each night, knowing that when I switch on next morning, everything will be as I left it.

If you really want to quit an application, and discard any open windows, then "Option-CMD-Q" will quit the application without saving the state.
 
ventmore said:
I personally like the resume feature. It allows me to shut my machine down fully each night, knowing that when I switch on next morning, everything will be as I left it.

If you really want to quit an application, and discard any open windows, then "Option-CMD-Q" will quit the application without saving the state.
Click to expand...

Resume still works when you reboot, even if you disabled it in System Preferences. That's a good thing. I like to have my windows restored when I reboot, just not when I reopen an app.

I see that you're only supposed to close windows and not quit apps, but Resume only works with certain apps so until every app gets this functionality, I don't want to remember which app I should Quit and in which app I should just close windows. I want unity, and I'll either treat all windows one way or the other, but I don't want to keep in mind that Photoshop needs to be quit while Preview doesn't.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back