Properly quitting apps on Mac OS X.

A friend of mine went along with me to the Apple reseller store to try out the demo units available there. He went on his own to 'test drive' the Mac, and came back unimpressed. He told me that while it looks nice, it's "very slow".

I went over to have a look - and lo & behold, the demo unit is full of open apps still running in the background. Of course that takes up processing cycles & memory and that in turn make it seemed very slow. I quit all the apps, and it was all speedy and snappy fast again.

How to spot open apps? You will see a little dot at the bottom of the Dock on the app that is open.

To properly quit the open apps, simply clicking on the "X" in the window is not enough. That closes the window, but not the app. The reason for that "x" will not always quit is that you might want an uncluttered desktop sometimes but at the same time, you may want the app still running as a background process. Who says an app have to be visible to be open?

Most people do not know this, and because of Windows-centric thinking, they assume that clicking on the "X" quits the whole app.

You go to the App menu and choose "Quit" or alternatively, press "Command+Q" to quit the App properly.