Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!att!rutgers!ucsd!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!decwrl!shelby!portia!johner
From: johner@portia.Stanford.EDU (John Lynch)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Power-Off message to Apps
Message-ID: <6694@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 16 Nov 89 01:53:50 GMT
Sender: John Lynch <johner@Portia.stanford.edu>
Reply-To: johner@portia.Stanford.EDU (John Lynch)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 21

I may have missed this discussion earlier, but I was wondering if anyone
knows what(if any) messages the Worskpace Manager sends to the running 
applications when the user hits the power off switch.  From the alert panel
that gets displayed and its statement that "all unsaved changes will be lost",
one would get the impression that all the Manager does is kill all of the
current processes.  However, in the class description for Application, there
are decalarations for methods suchch as powerOffIn:andSave:, which the 
application supposedly receives from the Workspace Manager when the machine 
powers off in so many milliseconds.  The application can supposedly go so far
as to request more time by sending an extendPowerOffBy: to the Manager, to
 allow more time for such necessities as saving documents and so forth.
  I've heard that in 0.8, there was more support for saving changes on
power off but that it was taken out for 0.9 and 1.0.  If this is true, does
anyone know the rationale for the change? As much as I like being able to
control the monitor and machine from the keyboard, having a button next to
my volume controls which can discard all of my work (with my only warning
being a quick alert panel),  seems a proposition of dubious merit. If the
idea is to allow the user a quick way to shut down the machine and all the
processes on it, then maybe that should be the last choice on that alert
panel.
  Anyway, just wondering...