Crashed Apps and Dealing with Them

March 30, 2011 in General, Mac, Tricks & Tips by Angelina Roberts

Cult of Mac reminds us of one unpleasant factor – Macs crash sometimes. But generally these crashes occur only for single applications and not for the entire system.

How do you know that an application has just crashed? It just stops responding. When you click on controls, nothing happens. It just doesn’t respond. So what can you do now?

First of all, do not panic. OS X keeps crashes under control. So even if your application has crashed, you can still work fine using other applications. You just have to be concerned about the app that crashed, because the other ones will work just fine.

Second, click at any part outside the app window, or click on another app’s icon. Now you are outside the boundary of the app. Now click on the Apple menu. It will open up some options for you, and from the list, you can see the option of Force Quit. Click on it. It will open a small window that will have a list of running apps. The crashed app will be marked with red color text and you can see ‘Not Responding’ written there. At the bottom, you will find a button saying ‘Force Quit.’ Now click on the app to highlight it, and then click on ‘Force Quit’.

As you can see, the crashed app will disappear and now you can restart the system if you want. Before you follow these steps and force quit an app, make sure that you have saved all the data. If you were working on an application and you have force quit it, then all the unsaved data will be lost.

This is why it is best that you keep saving your work as you make changes. It is the safest thing to do

Did you just face an app crash? Which application crashed and what did you do? Dealing with crashed apps is really easy. Let us know what you generally do when your apps crash.