Do something reasonable if they leave the app running for a super long time

[joshaber]

This is something @aroben brought up at the Objective-C mini-summit.

If the user just leaves the app open for forever, the user could be sitting on a version that needs to update but won't until they quit.

Maybe we could do something about that. Prompt the user, silently quit and re-launch (assuming good UI restoration), etc?

[alanjrogers]

Prompt the user

:point_up:

[jspahrsummers]

Why is a prompt necessary? If we do it well, the app restarting shouldn't even be visible to the user.

[dannygreg]

:point_up_2:

[alanjrogers]

Serious question: Would you complain it if Xcode did this?

[dannygreg]

It depends on how it's done.

If the app is in the background and we restore the app state exactly then it wouldn't be that much of an issue. Xcode would probably balls that up and would take 10 minutes to relaunch.

If we were to do an automated relaunch we would have to make sure our launch and state restoration times were teeny tiny.

[keithduncan]

I think that supporting state restoration and using OS X Automatic Termination is the way to do this, let the system decide when the application can be quit, and when it is we install available updates, would make downloading updates in the background #3 so that they aren’t interrupted more important

[jspahrsummers]

@keithduncan We should support that use case, but it also implies a different UX.

This would be about installing an update and relaunching in the background, if they've been leaving the app idling. We don't always want to install an update then quit (which would be the automatic termination behavior).