Force quit a misclicked application
Ivan | Mon, 2006-02-20 20:17
The dock is a great GUI feature for easy launch of applications. Maybe too easy. Too often I click the wrong application button. Especially if the dock magnification and hiding is on.
One way to reduce this stress is to actually switch off the magnification and hiding by CTRL-clicking the divider line just next to the trash bin icon and choosing the respective options.
But if you do click the wrong application — don't worry. You don't have to wait until the icon stops bouncing to quit the application. You can CTRL-click or click and hold the bouncing icon to bring up a contextual menu. Now, you can choose Force Quit to stop the process of loading the application. Quick and easy method to fix the misclick.
Unfortunately I have to use this trick too often and it makes me wonder if it does any bad to my system. For years I haven't experinced any problems, so I assume it's a safe thing to do.
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Maybe you should look into using an alternative launcher such as DragThing. As for force quitting apps? I've done it this way for years and haven't had any problems.
Btw welcome back :)
Haha, great post Ivan, I force quit misclicked apps probably 5+ times a day. I find at work, when I'm stressed out, it's very easy to click the wrong app, especially easy to click Illustrator, when Photoshop was really the intended receiver. Great tip. I'm sure all my co-workers do the same thing, but their non-geek pride wouldn't allow for them to use this :)
I _HIGHLY_ recommend using Launchbar or Quicksilver.
I have used launchbar for years and would never be without it. Spotlight does not replace it by any means, but it is an excellant compliment.
Much less mistaken launches, and day to day usage efficiency is greatly improved.
William Macdonald
PS A good tip to optimise the 'speed' of the dock is to resize it whilst holding down the ALT key. This will make the dock 'pause' at the fixed sizes of 32x32, 64x64 etc. This means that the icons are shown at their natural size rather being resized all the time. Resizing is done by grabbing the bar next to trash can and dragging up/down.
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http://www.macscan.net/
That PS tip is nice! Thanks!
If like me you quite liked the old school Apple menu for Launching favourite apps get hlod of Himmelbar. It's a simple little unobtrusive app. I still use the Dock more often than not though ;)
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http://mijlee.com
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Along with Quicksilver or Launchbar I also use LiteSwitch X as an applications switcher and it gives me more flexibility and options like switching to an app's icon and entering the keyboard shortcut for force-quit or force-relaunch. It also allows me to close multiple apps at the same time by pressing 'Q' key while the app icon is selected.
I like it ;)
This is a very useful thing wich I use a lot :) Especially for photoshop and other applicatios that takes a while to start.. I'm rather sure it won't harm your system. The worst case senario would be if the application wrote to some file when it was forced quit, but that seems unlikley. Theoretically you could get a bad config file or something like that, but I don't think many apps would do something like that.
I noticed that when using the Force Quit command in the Dock while an App is still launching will sort of mess up the smoothness of minimizing and maximizing windows to the Dock. You may have noticed this or you may not have. But, it does something that makes minimizing and maximizing windows choppy. I've tested this along with other users to double check my findings. It was the same way in Panther too.