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I'm not sure there was a way to introduce auto-save while maintaining the "principle of least surprise". I'm astonished, myself. I figured that, thirty years fr

I'm not sure there was a way to introduce auto-save while maintaining the "principle of least surprise". I'm astonished, myself. I figured that, thirty years from now, we'd still be losing changes to periodic crashes of unsaved documents rather than force any customer to alter a decades-old workflow. The problem with "Duplicate and Save" is that it implies that saving is an action that you can take, rather than something which has already happened. As arrrg said, that's not true: in Lion apps, every document which has a name is always saved. There is no longer a state of "changed but not saved". Change the label to "Duplicate and Save" and us old folks, trained for thirty years to be constantly seeking and pressing "Save" lest we lose everything, will be complaining that there's no way to "Save" without also "Duplicating". Which would not promote understanding, either. Don't worry, if you and the OP miss the old world of unsaved documents you can always find some old-school applications that preserve the old behavior. Join us Emacs users in the land of hoary UX paradigms! ;)

jessriedel 14y ago
Wouldn't it still have been better to use a different command name rather than commandeer one that has established expected behavior?
cheald 14y ago
Sure, you can have auto-save without surprising the user. Auto-save to something that isn't the file they opened, and the commit those changes when they invoke "save". The UI itself can show whatever the latest version it has (and offer nifty things like "compare with what's saved"), but the file itself isn't written until the user asks it to be. I'm not sure what word processing software you've been using for the past decade, but periodic backups and automatic restoration is more or less the norm, now. Heck, even my code editor persists unsaved buffers between sessions. I think the last time I lost unsaved work in a due to a program crash was probably last millennium. That's the root of my surprise here; there are proven solutions that don't break existing workflows. Why did Apple decide to break them now?
joe_the_user 14y ago
I figured that, thirty years from now, we'd still be losing changes to periodic crashes of unsaved documents rather than force any customer to alter a decades-old workflow. Huh? Word and Open Office have been recovering crashed documents, including unnamed, never-saved-documents, for quite a while. When that happens, it is a little confusing since you have to overwrite the existing document with the later version. But it also only occasionally happens whereas I often use the save-as functionality.

jessriedel 14y ago

Wouldn't it still have been better to use a different command name rather than commandeer one that has established expected behavior?

cheald 14y ago

Sure, you can have auto-save without surprising the user. Auto-save to something that isn't the file they opened, and the commit those changes when they invoke "save". The UI itself can show whatever the latest version it has (and offer nifty things like "compare with what's saved"), but the file itself isn't written until the user asks it to be. I'm not sure what word processing software you've been using for the past decade, but periodic backups and automatic restoration is more or less the norm, now. Heck, even my code editor persists unsaved buffers between sessions. I think the last time I lost unsaved work in a due to a program crash was probably last millennium. That's the root of my surprise here; there are proven solutions that don't break existing workflows. Why did Apple decide to break them now?

joe_the_user 14y ago

I figured that, thirty years from now, we'd still be losing changes to periodic crashes of unsaved documents rather than force any customer to alter a decades-old workflow. Huh? Word and Open Office have been recovering crashed documents, including unnamed, never-saved-documents, for quite a while. When that happens, it is a little confusing since you have to overwrite the existing document with the later version. But it also only occasionally happens whereas I often use the save-as functionality.