The
only penalty from leaving an application open after closing the last window is that its icon sits in the Dock, ready to respond to being clicked. I just don't see any good reason to have all apps quit when you close the last window. It wastes time and CPU cycles re-opening the app, and it is a nuisance with any sort of multi-document app like PS, Quark, Word or whatever. There are some limited cases where it might be OK, but while I wouldn't put up much resistance to something like this so long as the logic is apparent to the user, it's really unnecessary and unobtrusive just to leave things running. Perhaps a better solution would be to hide apps' Dock icons that don't have any windows open and haven't been used in a while. Quit when you shut down or log off. This isn't OS 9 and we have to stop thinking of these things in terms of old limitations.
Effects should not be distracting because they should be focused on the foreground action, or to call attention where needed from the background. The effects in OS X that don't pertain to this are optional, you can turn them off; things like changing desktops and iChat's alerts and status changes. Effects are not menat to improve productivity per se, they neer have been. Effects that serve the purpose of user orientation (that is, clarity, knowing hat's going on where) should be there, and shouldn't be optional. Turning everything into options makes a computer more complicated to use, defeating the point of turning off the effects for the sake of simplicity. One might appear more complicated, but the other truly is to use. Besides, OS X has certainly improved on their effects, it's already less distracting than the current Windows effects and so far is an order of magnitude less ditracting than Longhorn's demonstrated (which, to be fair, seem more hypothetical at this point) effects.
Anyway, back to the original topic, I find it so interesting how Apple develops its UI now. I remember all the hubbub when Apple under Jobs dissolved their HI team. We all thought that it meant the end of interface improvements to the Mac. (Though it seems some don't want any changes in the first place.

) Instead, Apple moved many of these people or their equivalents into project teams. It's a totally different approach to these things. Rather than making seismic shifts in the UI once in a while, applications introduce new ideas in smaller doses at a steady pace. Also, it means that ideas are put into the realm of praxis more often rather than being left as a white paper. This is why OS X's and other Apple software yearly upgrade cycles are so important. Slow and steady wins the race, as the saying goes. We can see how lessons from iTunes has affects the other iApps and the Finder. We see how UI ideas from NeXT have helped the Macintosh user experience. We can see when some applications don't always match up, where one app has a great feature but it hasn't been brought into others yet. Apple sacrificed some consistency for more advancement of UI improvements. Try it in one place, one team thinks of an idea, and if it's helpful, others pick up on it. These things sort of add up over time, and make the transition of users to new ways of working easier. I get the feeling that much of what OS X (I still think they will keep OS X by then) will be like is under our noses, with some notable exceptions, like the example of Expose.
It's easier to think of these things by addressing immediate concerns and seeing how a small improvement might lead to a new concept and become more pervasive, find implementations in other areas. For example, we keep talking about smart playlist functionality in other apps like the Finder, Mail and so forth because it addresses how we like to organize by criteria on the fly, making the process more automated. To me, it still feels like the Dock is sort neither here-nor-there in terms of its role in the OS. So what is it, what do we need one for? I use mine simply to access certain tools or places system-wide very quickly. I use it less for window management, but it's nice to get things out of the way with it every so often. So it's a universal accessibility tool, either to get to things or to put them aside for the moment. I'm trying to wrack my brain for things I'd like to do more easily from the OS. If we keep track of this sort of stuff, we can probably get some idea of what Apple will improve. Problem is, we take how we work for granted, at least I do. It's harder to think about what we're missing when we learn to work with the limitations of the OS so well.
