Lamenting on Twitter about anything usually results in some pretty interesting responses. Today’s lament was brought to you by Lion, and the auto-window restore functionality that was hyped by Apple. On the surface the feature is pretty awesome. If a window crashes or you accidentally close a window, Lion will restore the application to the state it was in before the crash. Great for mistakes; terrible for those who closed an application intentionally.
Consider this: You’re working with a bunch of images in Preview, you finish up, and hit CMD+Q to quit the application because you’re done resizing 10 images. Normally that would be the end of it, but in Lion, the next time you open preview you’re getting all 10 images opened again. It gets annoying pretty quickly, partially because you’re now stuck closing 10 windows one by one before closing an application, but mostly because you don’t even know those 10 windows are open again until you happen to stumble on them because they’re buried underneath each other, one on top of the other.
It’s one thing to provide the functionality on a crash, and it’s another when you close out an application on purpose. At this point auto restore has to go for me. Here’s how you turn it off:
- Click the Apple Icon in the top left corner of the screen
- Click System Preferences
- Click General under the Personal heading
- Uncheck Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps
- Done
Note: This turns off the feature entirely, including app crashes. So if you’re okay with that, you can turn this off without a hitch.
Hat tip to rsmoz for sending this one in
