Force Quit

What causes an application to spaz out so that you have to force quit the app? This has happened with my Word and Proteus apps. I understand that this happens on windows machines too, just curious if there was an answer for macs that is a little more sufficient than the windows standard "sometimes it just happens."

Well, Word is made by Microsoft, so the answer for Word is 'Sometimes it just happens'....

I don't know about Proteus though, what kind of program is it?

m1k said:

I don't know about Proteus though, what kind of program is it?

Click to expand...

It's an integrated messenger program for mac's.
http://www.proteusx.com/

Well, the reason it "just happens" (on any platform) is because of an error in the code. The programmer(s) who wrote it screwed up. Maybe the software tried to access a bit of memory that was off limits, or maybe it kept looping when it should have stopped, or maybe it should have taken one branch but instead it took another.

All software has bugs. Some programs have more than others, and some are more serious than others. Some companies (Ahem) tend to produce software of lower quality than others. OS X can't fix the bugs that programmers create, but it tends to limit their impact fairly well; ie, one bad program doesn't bring down the whole computer.

I seem to get the color-pinwheel of death a lot more frequently than w/ windows

I use Word quite a bit and Proteus all the time.. I don't either one of those problems. Maybe a bad install? maybe bad preferences.. bad permissions on those preferences? It could be a lot of things.

Hi,

Sorry but I don't have an answer but only want to add to your query.

I was using Azureus when it died on my for 4 minutes to quit. So I forced quit and it came up with a debug log file (no idea what that is) but I deleted it.

Can I ask does force quitting cause corruption/damage of the app or OS X in anyway?

Thanks heaps.

Toanjii said:

Can I ask does force quitting cause corruption/damage of the app or OS X in anyway?

Thanks heaps.

Click to expand...

No. Terminating the application will not cause problems in most cases. There are times when the program/application screwed everything so bad that force quiting does nothing and only a reset/reboot wil solve the problem.

rman said:

No. Terminating the application will cause problem in most cases. There are times when the program/application screwed everything so bad that force quiting does nothing and only a reset/reboot wil solve the problem.

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Hi rman,

Sorry but I'm a bit confused about what you mean by "no" then the following sentences. So does it cause problems/damage to OS X or the app?

Thanks heaps.

Toan.

Sorry Toanjii, I forgot the word not in the first sentence.

As in "Terminating the application will not cause problems in most cases."

Thanks rman.

Toan.