A document you 'close', an application you 'exit' or 'quit'. The document-centric people have been trying to do away with applications since the the beginning of GUIs.
It reality, the document metaphor works great for a few things that resemble documents. But documents are as much an artifact of the paper-handling wold as processess login sessions are to the electronic world. Are they really more fundamental than, say, a stapler? Is a stapler worthy of being a fundamental pervasive metaphor for interaction?
Games? Videos? Terminal windows? Phone calls? Desktop sharing? Text and IM? Many of the things we do with computers have little to do with documents.
Efforts to implement the stapler model include "Cut and Paste" and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). Microsoft thought you ought to be able to staple anything to anything, like a terminal in the middle of your word document or a clock on your spreadsheet, for no reason other than just because you can. It didn't work because app developers needed to do too much work to support it, so few programs other than Microsoft's own office software were built to link items together like that.
It reality, the document metaphor works great for a few things that resemble documents. But documents are as much an artifact of the paper-handling wold as processess login sessions are to the electronic world. Are they really more fundamental than, say, a stapler? Is a stapler worthy of being a fundamental pervasive metaphor for interaction?
Games? Videos? Terminal windows? Phone calls? Desktop sharing? Text and IM? Many of the things we do with computers have little to do with documents.