Now also when restarting Blender (frequent when trying to close the preferences window and forgetting that it closes the application) the preferences window is always open by default and is titled "Blender" instead of "User Preferences". My first day using this application and already thinking of dubbing it "Blunder" based on its user-interface and poor (low-contrast) default color theme.

I cannot reproduce this on my Macbook Pro Retina (Late 2013). ;)

Let's see if a screen capture will work...

Okay, can't tell from the submission form, but presuming the submitted comment will show the screenshot, you will notice that both the User Preferences window and the Application window are both titled "Blender". Clicking the red close circle on the preferences window closes Blender (all windows). Command-w with the preferences window active closes the application. Selecting "Close" from the Windows menu closes the application. I cannot get the preferences window to close without closing Blender.

Btw, this is on a MacBook Pro Retina Late 2014, the newest model released.

My only guess is you once saved your startup file with the preferences open in background what mudlles the window order, should not happen though.
Try delete your startup.blend and create a new one.
Should not have any sideefect as you described though, must lookat ....

Jens

Agreed, should not happen. Where would that startup.blend file be located at?

I found the startup.blend file down in Application Support and deleted it, as well as userpref.blend but there is still a bug in the application. Upon launching Blender the preferences no longer auto-displays but then opening User Preferences, making changes, saving the settings, then closing the preferences still quits the application instead of just closing the preferences window. (Were preferences tested before releasing the program?)

So far you are the only one with this problem. We are very supportive and try to help you out, but your "Blender is bad" attitude is not helpful.

Very odd, cannot still nort reproduce.
Do you perhaps use the "seperate spaces" option ?

I have no idea what "separate spaces" is. Simply downloaded the latest release of Blender (first-time download), moved the folder to Applications, launched the program, opened User Preferences, changed Input Select from "Right" to "Left", clicked "Save User Settings", then closed (or rather tried to close) the preferences window (doesn't matter how - all have the same effect: red close button, command-w, Windows->Close) and the application quits. If I thought Blender was bad then I wouldn't have downloaded it to try it out after hearing so many good things about it, but the user-interface is overwhelming compared to similar applications and having the application quit when closing preferences is pretty much a blocking issue.

That is odd, and probably would have been noticed by others already ( we have many users on Mac OS). You can try to re-download it, and start it from the download folder or so, although I don't think that this should cause any problem.

(Btw was just referring to your "Blunder" comment. :D )

Technically it looks like something is odd with window id's. I made Blender only allow immediate close if
a: nothing was changed and b: the window to be closed is the last mainwindow open.
Although prefs is a special case it seems.
Else you would get a quit dialog. Have no clue why this should be different in your environment atm.

Very odd noone can reproduce this.

Can you test following: open your blender and do move the default cube and then try close either prfs or mainwindow again.
Does it give a dialog ?

Guess I'm just special? :)

Launched Blender and moved the default cube then closed the application, got prompted that some changes are not saved. Quit anyway.

Launched Blender and moved the default cube, then opened User Preferences, made no changes and immediately clicked the red close circle to close the preferences window, got prompted that some changes are not saved and whether I want to quit anyway.

Don't know why, but it's as though Blender (or OS X) is believing the parent application window to be closing rather than the child preferences window.

Yes, thats indeed a fact, but why the heck ?

It looks as just klicking the close button does not make the window keywindow, checking.
Also i'am sure on 10.8 where it was developed the behavoiur was different.

hmmm

Okay looked through all code now and tested circumstances.
Still cannot reproduce. I know we have cornercases when closing
an non-keywindow, for i had to use a trick to not close without dialog
when the main application window will be closed.
To plain closing a window there must be > 1 window and it is not
objectAtIndex:[windowsList count] - 1, this trick avoids mainwin closing
due it was moved to index 1 when another win gets frontmost.

I cannot see atm. why this should behave any different for you.
Very odd.

Also cannot use NSWindow isMainWindow anymore it seems, its now deprecated
but this would not help too much as i checked mainwin does not explicitely mean its
the app mainwin ( in nib, which we don't use in Blender ) Sigh ...

Forgot explanation of your situation:

			case GHOST_kEventWindowClose:
				// check for index of mainwindow as it would quit blender without dialog and discard
				if ([windowsList count] > 1  && window->getCocoaWindow() != [windowsList objectAtIndex:[windowsList count] - 1]) {
					pushEvent( new GHOST_Event(getMilliSeconds(), GHOST_kEventWindowClose, window) );
				}
				else {
					handleQuitRequest(); // -> quit dialog
				}
				break;

windowcount is > 1 ( mainwin + prefs = 2 )
&& prefs is active thus at index0 ergo allowd to push close event.
The else clause calling handleQuitRequest() should nevver happer here.

Here's where it gets a little more odd. I rebooted my Mac and the problem is gone. It's now working the way I would expect it to. Weird that if something was quirked in the OS only Blender was affected by it rather than other apps as well. Sorry for taking up so much of your time. Now I get to watch some tutorials and try figuring out this beast.