As far as Quit goes, I'm not sure we're ther yet. There'd need to be some sort of "hide" function as well as a graceful way to manage app memory. I've got 512 MBs and still get very nervous when I have a bunch of apps "un-quit".

MacOS open/save boxes are a bit confusing to me.

Erik Barzeski has some sensible reactions to Matthew Thomas’s article. I think there’s a deeper UI principle here, almost a quality without a name. It’s about presenting the right abstraction to the user. Of course the computer should...

The mistake you made with regard to “Quit” is not unique to you. Several people who e-mailed me took the same approach (which, perhaps, indicates a usability problem in my essay). That is: you assumed that you could take an existing program, remove Quit, and make *no other changes*, and it would still be just as usable. Of course that is not the case.

When porting an interface design from MS Windows to Mac OS, you have to do a lot more than just changing “Exit” to “Quit”. And when porting an app from Mac OS to my imagined system, you’d have to do a *lot* more than just removing “Quit”. Specifically, you’d have to split up today’s monolithic, slow-launching “applications” into dozens of near-instantly-launching viewers and editors, accompanied by hundreds of accessory programs. DVD Studio Pro and Photoshop, as we know them, would cease to exist.

Your disagreement with auto-saving is more amusing, because it demonstrates a defiance of history that is probably more brash then you intended. History, as you know, is whatever happened since the invention of writing. And for about 4975 of the past 5000 years, when someone did some writing (on clay tablets, or stone, or papyrus, or paper, or whatever), the default behavior was for it to *stay* written. If you wanted it to be deleted, you had to chuck it in the Trash.

I agree, sometimes when you create a document, you don’t want to keep it. But it's only in the past 25 years that personal computers have changed the default behavior of written material — from assuming that what you create is valuable, to assuming that it is worthless. With most personal computers, you have to go to rather ridiculous lengths (“File”, “Save”, choose a folder, type a name, “Save”) to declare that your writing *isn’t* worthless.

That isn’t because of any fundamental change in humans’ artistic ability — that they suddenly started creating really crappy stuff. Rather, it’s because of hardware constraints in the 1970s and early ’80s (slow disks and no multithreading), constraints which are now largely no longer an issue. Certainly there are exceptions, such as your 300 MB Photoshop file, but those exceptions shouldn’t be the tail that wags the dog. (The fear caused by auto-saving being a pref — which might have been turned off while you weren’t watching — would, in my view, be worse than not changing the current behavior at all.)

Unfortunately, it seems your reasonable disagreement with those two points led you into an entirely unreasonable disagreement with automatically choosing a filename. Saving a document as “More drivel” is, obviously, a straw man argument — an automatic naming algorithm would never do that. Unless, of course, it was an article, story, or photo in which you’d put the heading “More drivel” at the top — in which case that is probably *precisely* what you’d want the file to be called.

1. Who on earth is this "Thomas" fellow?

2. Why is he pretending to have written my essay?

Once that's settled, I'll gladly explain the more substantive mistakes in your criticism.