Comments on: Save Should Die

By: chris

chris — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:05:12 +0000

@Andy: I’m open to new-school thoughts – share ‘em. (What can I say? I’m still stuck in Svn).

By: chris

chris — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:48:00 +0000

@Killian: Large file formats are indeed a, if I may, “trickier” case than text files but not very much. Your thinking is – to borrow your phrase – typical thinking of people who don’t understand how modern version control and file systems work. But no worries: just as TM allows one to exclude directories from backup we could create an option for you to exclude files by type, application, directory, size… whatever floats your boat mate. This is fantasy software – you can have any feature you want!

By: Collin VanDyck

Collin VanDyck — Tue, 13 May 2008 13:03:23 +0000

It’s a funny thing to think about, certainly. There is a part of me that resists the idea of no save buttons anywhere. When I try to examine the cause of the resistance, I can’t find any good reason and I have to assume it’s just a side effect of having grown up in an era where there were clear divisions between volatile and persisted data.

By: Kilian

Kilian — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:52:02 +0000

Well, this is for me the typical thinking of people who do mainly developement of more or less text. You have a point as long as you stay in your paradigm, but once you start generalising “what good is for me, must be valid for everyone” you get it totally wrong. This might work for programmers or any other more or less text based editing (see your WordPress analogy).

Also your argument for saving everything because we have terabyte drives is only valid if you talk about your mostly text based files, because they don’t take much space. Try do work with uncompressed HD video and terabytes are peanuts.

As a designer I very often open a huge Photoshop document, just to make some changes, just for export, of which I don’t need or want to keep the original files with the changes. In that case I open the document, make the changes, export it to the final format and don’t save the PSD file. I’d be getting nuts if the system would automatically save that data, because I’d have to dig into TimeMachine and get the previous version back again. It would also be an enormous waste of space, because Photoshop files can grow huge.

Even worse with audio editing (as long as you do it non-destructive, you’re just shoving markers around, so no damage done) sometimes you need to edit an audio file directly (destructively), then I only want to save when I really am sure that’s the change I want, because some audio editors cannot use the undo command beyond the last save. And here, too it often happens that I just want to do a quick edit and export the result maybe directly as MP3, I don’t want to keep the original with those changes. Auto saving would always result in more work and wasted disk space.

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 13 May 2008 07:18:01 +0000

>However, imagine TM with a per-file view in which, instead of viewing the history of an entire directory, you just browsed the content history of a single file? Right there, in the Finder. Historical timeline scrubbing of a document’s contents from within the document itself perhaps?

Revision control per-file is sooooo old-style revision control. Who uses CVS anymore?

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 13 May 2008 03:59:28 +0000

This paridigm is used in the AlphaSmart writing devices by Rennaissance Learning. These are basically keyboards with a few megs of flash and monochrome calculator-like LCD. Whatever you type is saved; it’s just like writing, no saving, no opening a file.