Lion’s Frustrating Restart Behaviour
When Apple introduced OS X Lion this year one of the controversial features was the option to resume all applications on rebooting, much like the way the iPad and iPhone behave. While this in and of itself would not such a bad thing if it was purely optional, there are some things about its behaviour that are very frustrating. First of all, there is the fact that it is the default option. For many, the primary purpose of restarting is to restore their computer to a clean state, fresh state. To do this in Lion you have to remember to tick off the check box that tells OS X to reopen windows when logging back in.
The fact that this is ticked by default isn’t what is annoying, but the fact that the state isn’t persistent. If you tick it off it doesn’t remember that it was ticked off the next time you restart, so yu have to remember it every time you restart. But that is just a minor annoyance. The bigger issue occurs if there is a non standard restart dialog. What do I mean by this?
If you go to restart and someone is sharing files from your computer you get an altogether different dialog box when you choose restart:
Notice something missing? In this case there is nothing you can do if you want a clean restart, bar finding the offending computer on your network and kick them off. The same happens with a software update that requires a restart. It’s very frustrating, inconsistent and quite un-apple like. Anyway, I’ve filed a bug report and if this annoys you I suggest you do too.
