OS X Mountain Lion Bible

Quitting Applications

When you've finished working with an application, you can quit it, which stops OS X from running it. This frees up some system resources, enabling OS X to run other programs more efficiently. OS X offers several methods for quitting an application. Some are for typical situations, whereas others are for when a program stops responding.

Quitting from within an application

OS X provides a uniform way to quit applications: Choose Quit from the application menu (such as Word⇒Quit), or press +Q in the active application.

If you have any documents with unsaved data, OS X displays an alert dialog box or settings sheet for each unsaved document. This is the same dialog box or settings sheet that appears if you try to close a document before saving its content. You can click one of three buttons:

• Don't Save: This option quits the application without saving your document. Any changes that you have made to the document are discarded.

• Cancel: This option cancels the quit process, returning you to the document window.

• Save: This option saves the document and then quits the application.

New Feature

For applications that support Auto Save and Versions (see Chapter 8), you're not asked whether to save unsaved changes. That's because your changes are saved automatically as you type. But OS X Mountain Lion adds a new option in the General system preference (see Chapter ...