Q: Disable autosave

I invent nothing,

FileMaker apply Autosave for years.

As far as I know, it's a database application.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 31 octobre 2011 16:27:53

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.2

My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>

Please : Search for questions similar to your own before submitting them to the community

And there it is in a nutshell:

>> Always the same question, so, always the same kind of answer. <<

The fact, plain for all to see, is that you have NEVER answered my question...you simply robotically repeat the same non-answer. You refuse to describe what exactly would happen under my proposed scheme of Auto Save/Versioning as the default but capable of being disabled.

You refuse because you know that the honest answer to this question is "Nothing disastrous would happen to the poor saps who still can't learn to key Command-S every once in a while...they would still be completely protected."

This answer doesn't suit your world view, so you just pretend it doesn't exist.

I asked you "What exactly would happen? Would users who desperately need Auto Save/Versioning somehow disable it by accident? Or for reasons unknown, decide to disable it without knowing the consequences of their actions? (An 'are you sure?' warning dialog box would easily cover this unlikely eventuality.)"

In your typical fashion, you ignored this part of my post. I love making you squirm, Yvan, and exposing you for the chicken-heart you really are. Until you answer this question, I will continue to do so.

DChord568 wrote:

 

I would object strenuously to an automobile design in which the seat belts automatically buckled you in the moment you started your car's iginition, and could not be manually removed from use by the driver or passenger

I've heard Volvos do that. I've heard a story abuot a guy who went in his Volvo to buy a Thanksgiving turkey. The turkey was very large so he put it on the front passenger's seat but the car wouldn't start, so he had to put the safety belt on the turkey.

Your response is a bit too close to an exercise in free association.  Please take more time to organize your thoughts before making posts such as this one.  Please.

KOENIG Yvan wrote:

 

DChord568 wrote:

 

1) What is wrong with making Auto Save/Versioning the default, but including the option for expert users who so choose to disable it? Please describe, in detail, the specific disasters that will result from this.

 

I repeat that I receive every weeks messages fropm users which loose their documents or got corrupted ones and ask for help.

Apple introduced Versions and Autosave to solve these problems.

I'm not working in their labs so I may just try to guess the reasons of their choices.

And my guess is that they thought that an Autosave feature which may be disabled will be inefficient.

They had the example of Filemaker which behave this way with no problem.

So it's easy to guess that they conclude that applying the same scheme to every app was a good answer to a true problem.

If the feature is optional, we will continue to have reports from users loosing documents and Apple want to get rid of that.

There is such an optional feature in iWork apps from the beginning and it's clear that most users don't enable it … and post crying when they loose a document. It sounds foolish but once, I received a document which was a quite finished thesis. The owner had absolutely no backup.

There is also an option allowing them to urge the app to store a preview.pdf file in their documents.

Sometimes, this document was the one allowing users to retrieve their datas in a corrupted file but most of the corrupted docs which are sent to me in hope that I will revive them don't embed this kind of emergency item.

IDG Books Worldwide, Inc. publish books entitled xxxx for dummies.

Apple publish applications for dummies.

 

Look, at the entry page of these frorums.

Some applications are described as Professional ones which means that others aren't.

iPhoto is cheaper than Aperture but if you want to make professional work, better use Aperture.

Apple deliberately refuse to enter the Professional area for some products like iWork or iLife.

Is it surprising that they adjust their products to the targetted customers ? My answer is NO.

 

I perfectly know that disabling the Versions/Autosave features may be done.

At this time, the app behave a way under 10.6.x, an other way under 10.7.x.

I guess that it would be easy to change this test so that it behave the old way if the system is 10.6.x or if the user checked a box.

I'm even surprised, if the problem is so huge that you describe it, that nobody has deliver a tool changing the existing test. It's one of the reasons which make me think that the number of bored users like you is really small.

What's sure is that:

(1) Lion is available since three months,

(2) since this delivery you are claiming that it brought awful features

 

but I see no echo from Apple which took time to deliver two updates for the system itself.

 

2) How, exactly, to you defend a "feature" that renders a program unusable (the example of the Keynote presentation with large files imbedded that brings up a spinning beach ball every few seconds during Auto Save)? Why is this perfectly OK with you? What alternative do you propose for this user? (And PLEASE don't say PowerPoint!)

Don't be afraid, M…oSoft products aren't allowed to enter my machines so I will not tell you to use PowerPoint.

But I didn't wait you to write about the the spinning wheel problem.

Search in iWork dedicated forums with a request like :

snail AND iWork 

or

snail AND yvan

and you will see that I wrote upon this problem more often that I wrote in this thread.

More, in one of the threads dedicated to AutoSave (maybe this one), I wrote that I was glad that this problem increased because it will, at last, force Apple engineers to admit that there is a huge design flaw in the iWork applications.

If you really hope that Apple introduce a switch allowing you to disable Autosave and/or Versions, why are you running iWork 9.1 applications ?

Run iWork 9.0.5 ones, work the old way and wait for a new release.

 

From my point of view, Versions and Autosave will be permanently active in next releases but the apps will be redesigned so that they will no longer bring the spinning wheel.

Of course I may be wrong, but in this case we will get switches and redesigned apps because the engineers have no choice : the apps MUST be redesigned to become iCloud compliant.

 

The awful behavior of iWork apps is not new, it just highlighted by the introduction of Versions & Autosave.

Yesterdays I worked under 10.6.8 on a 5263 rows Numbers table containing six columns filled with pure datas and just the formula =""&F in cells of column G

The imported values embedded dates in column F. On my French System, imported dates default to the format 28 oct. 2011 but I want them to be 28/09/2011. To change the format, the app requires more than 20 minutes. It took less than 10 seconds in AppleWorks.

 

The hosting machine is described in my signature, I just started it from an external Firewire 800 HD with 10.6.8.

As you may see, there is no need for Lion, Versions and Autosave to see slooooooooooooooooooooow apps.

This awful behavior is reported since february 2009 without any change.

My bet is that we will get changes on this feature with next release.

If we really get that, honestly the fact that Versions & Autosave apply all the time or may be disabled is out of my own concern. In French : "'je m'en fout" or "je n’en ai rien à cirer".

 

May you at last understand that I'm trying to define a way to work with the existing tools, not with what this or that user is dreaming of. Existing tools are available, dreamed ones may be delivered one day or may never be.

As far as I know, those trying to make money with these products are you. On my side, it's not a problem. Earning one's living was my duty before 2003. Now, I'm retired and I'm busy spending what I earnt. I refuse when an user which I helped want to send me some reward.

 

If the answer given to the very first message posted in this thread was "We wish to get the ability to switch off Versions and/or Autosave", I would never enter it.

But I can't accept answers saying "Apple must give…".

Apple must nothing except make cash and during the late ten years (which is the correct syntax: the ten late years or the late ten years ?) they prove that they are efficient to do that. And yes, during these years, they dropped old users.

 

I know old friends which left Apple when they dropped OS 9.2.1.

I know old friends which left Apple when they dropped AppleWorks.

I know some of them which never accepted the switch to intel processors and decided to leave and enter the world which stick to Intel from day one.

It seems clear that we are not friends but I guess that if you leave the boat, nobody will cry in Cupertino.

 

I wish you that my understanding of Apple strategy is wrong but I'm quite sure that I'm right.

 

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) dimanche 30 octobre 2011 23:47:40

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.2

My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>

Please : Search for questions similar to your own before submitting them to the community

 

 

Earlier, I wrote:

>> Let's set aside for a moment the fact that injury or death in an automobile accident is on a slightly different level than loss of data on a computer. How can you miss the obvious fact that safety belts can be "disabled" easily if the user simply declines to buckle them in the first place?

If you really want to go down this path, OK. I am a fervent believer in safety belts in automobiles. I use them without exception when I'm on the road, and think that anyone who refuses to use them is an utter fool.

However, I would object strenuously to an automobile design in which the seat belts automatically buckled you in the moment you started your car's iginition, and could not be manually removed from use by the driver or passenger; i.e., if they only ever would release you when you turned off the ignition. (Am I remembering correctly that at one time there were automobile models with safety belts that operated in this way? If there were, they certainly didn't last long, and with good reason.) <<

I attempted to add something to this post, but in the course of my editing it, Apple decided to do forum maintenance, and I lost what I had typed and hoped to add.

In essence, what I was saying with regard to the "automatic" seat belt option is that I and others disdain it because it takes control of our driving experience away from us. Many, including myself, believe strongly in seat belt use, and take it upon ourselves to always buckle up the moment we enter a car.

However, an automatic seat belt takes away that control, and assumes that you will always want to be buckled up — even, for example when all you're doing is repositioning your car from your driveway to a cut-off area. It takes the human part of the equation right out of it, and here is the analogy to Auto-Save and Versioning.

Just as I choose to always buckle my seat belt, I would like to choose to manage the state of my documents myself, on MY timetable — without a faceless entity (the operating system) making that choice for me.

If I open something in Preview and rotate it or add a notation, it should be MY choice if I decide I ultimately want to leave that document unaltered from its original state.

It should be MY choice if I prefer to manually save multiple versions of a document (with MY preferred file-naming convention) — as opposed to having unnamed multiple versions all contained within one document, and no way of telling which version is which or when it was created.

If I decide, upon a whim, that the additional text I've just added to Pages document makes it different enough that it really ought to be saved separately under its own name (while preserving a version it its present state) before I do any further work on it, I should be able to accomplish this — at the exact moment I choose to do it — easily and without multiple steps.

At present, I can do all of the above — if I can do it at all — in Lion only if I jump through a number of hoops and carefully plan things in advance. I want control of my documents returned to me. I don't want a faceless entity inserting itself in the process.

So there's the rub — Auto Save and Versions purport to make the Macintosh experience "easier" because you don't have to worry about saving. But in many instances, it has the opposite effect — it makes the Macintosh experience more difficult.

If ease of computing for all is the goal here, this can only be done if the user has the option to disable Auto Save and Versioning.

Wow - this has become quite a thread.

Now – yes, no matter how Save As and Versions and AutoSave really work, for me personally it doesn't work at the moment, as I am the guy (or one of them) with the large Keynote files.

I have no issue with Apple's innovations or updates. Sometimes they are great. Sometimes not so much (Final Cut X, to name just one). But we move on an and use the tools we need and like.

So - thank you for the answer that iWork 9.0.5 would resolve my issue. My mistake was not to read all the update notes. I usually read a bit into it, but must have missed the point, where this will Autosave large documents every few minutes or seconds and bringing my 3 year old MacBookPro to a grinding halt. Great when working on Pages docs, emails and Text Edit files. not so great when quickly editing images to crop an avatar image and forgetting that this now saves the original image (16 years of mac experience suddenly changed takes some time to get used to), and absolutely not great on my presentation files.

So - how can I easily go back to Keynote 9.0.5, and will it still open my most recent files?

Can I still download 9.0.5 from somewhere? I can reinstall from the original disc, but how to get to 9.0.5?

thank you for any help,

Stefan.

The process was described many times. Just need users able to read carefully.

Go to :

http://www.box.net/shared/xppaki015asuuzbb34i7

Download :

uninstall iWork '09.zip

unpack the archive and run the script which will remove every files linked to iWork '09.

Install iWork '09 from your DVD

then apply the updater to iWork 9.0.5 available at :

I'm so tied to Apple decisions that, during the few days when Apple removed these updaters, I made them available from my iDisk and warned Apple that removing the updaters as they did was a serious problem.

Next time, when an update is delivered, don't install it on a production HD but on one dedicated to tests. This way you will be able to check if the updated version fit your needs. We are millions of users working this way. And I can't imagine how somebody using a mac to earn money may behave an other way.

This time there is no bug in the new versions but features which you dislike but, in the past there were updates embedding serious bugs. Applying them directly on production machines was just playing with matches.

When Apple delivered Lion, Versions and Autosave were widely publicized. Assuming that such features wouldn't impact the behavior of applications was just dumb. When he saw that the OS introduced AutoSave, my grandSon (less than 12 years old) asked me "Pappy, how many time is required to save a document ?".

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) jeudi 3 novembre 2011 17:37:35

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.2

My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>

Please : Search for questions similar to your own before submitting them to the community

Here is the bottom line issue with autosave, in a business or even home network environment where you share files it basically allows one user to accidentally overwrite a document without intending to.  In a business environment where 100s of people might share that document this is a management nightmare.

Autosave works great for personal files on your local hard drive but in a business class environment Apple has shown once again they just don't get it.  Summary, a feature that was supposed to prevent accidental data loss is now a huge risk for data loss.  That = FAIL.

Actually seems like we are not the only ones having major problems with all the "improvements" which made lion worse than Snow Leopard: http://insights.chitika.com/2011/mac-os-x-lion-fails-to-roar/

Seems like there are lots of users who hate Lion.

I hope this finally gives a message to Apple to make Autosave and Versioning optional and then fix the broken workflow. The fixes would be so easy, but they need to finally get off their high horses and analyze how everybody else does it instead of reinventing the wheel squared.

Werner P. wrote:

 

Actually seems like we are not the only ones having major problems with all the "improvements" which made lion worse than Snow Leopard: http://insights.chitika.com/2011/mac-os-x-lion-fails-to-roar/

 

Seems like there are lots of users who hate Lion.

I hope this finally gives a message to Apple to make Autosave and Versioning optional and then fix the broken workflow. The fixes would be so easy, but they need to finally get off their high horses and analyze how everybody else does it instead of reinventing the wheel squared.

Thanks for the link, Werner. "Lion letdowns"- the linked article- is also interesting.

Well I am no longer holding out hope that they will fix this broken functionality and let us disable versions and auto-save (and bring back save as).

Hopefully they will make iCloud available to Snow Leopard - so I can Upgrade back to an excellent, functional OS.

Stupidly, I switched to iCloud from MobileMe... oh well, if they don't provide iCloud for SL - will be left with the alternative of porting mail, contacts and cal over to Gmail and then I'll be able to Upgrade to SL... sigh.

Personally I don't want to have anything to do with iCloud. Just as Apple dropped MobileMe, so at some future point it's likely to drop iCloud or start charging $$$ for the use of it.

But I don't trust it to be secure anyway and I'm not always connected to the Internet when I'm on the road, so for me the Cloud is pointless.

Apple seems to have a habit of getting people using things and then leaving them in the **** by discontinuing them. So I wouldn't want to get too attached to anything they're currently offering.

FYI, there is a way to go back to Snow.

In my case I was able to just use a clone I always have, + a bit of jiggling with new files created in Lion, etc.

Kappy has posted a step-by-step guide of how to get back to SL. I don't know where it is though. Somewhere in these threads.

I've been a dedicated Apple computer user since the Apple Lisa 2. I've been following the latest operating systems. I subscribe to Macworld and read about all the new features, and I try them out in the stores. Autosave has had me concerned since I first heard about it. I'm still using OS 10.5.8, while my wife uses Snow Leopard because her computer is a bit newer. We are fairly happy where we are, and until I see what is going to happen with this, and the many other issues which people are not pleased with, we will not be upgrading, for as long as we can avoid it. We are both graphic and web design professionals and cater to many small businesses and churches in our area.<Edited by Host> For many things I do on the computer, I find myself working with very large files both in pro apps like Photoshop, as well as non-pro apps such as Pages and Keynote. Right now, I enjoy the option of saving when I WANT to. My wife and I also work off of a networked file server (an older Mac Mini). It scares me a bit not having that kind of control. Autosave would be something I would want to test out for an extended period of time before adopting into my daily workflow.

My thoughts exactly. Well, almost.

I've been developing for the web on a mac for the last 5 years.

I am a rather rigid and organized person when it comes to my work.

I could try to like the new autosave and versions feature but it's just too **** dangerous!

I did tests on non-critical files and, just as expected, you loose control over what you want to save and when and your files actually get overwritten.

I also just realized that Google Docs does exactly the same thing. Their "File" menu doesn't have a "Save As..." option. There's only a "Make a copy.." option. Since I never user Google Docs for critical documents, I never really noticed and it never really bothered be.

But for my design work... On a regular basis I might have 50 revisions of the same website design. Then I might move back and forth between these revisions to get elements that I once used and deleted, maybe open an older revision just to look at it and compare, etc. This is all now basically impossible or difficult to accomplish.

Right now I am not using any apps that support this "feature" (except TextEdit for quick notes).

I doubt Apple will decide to "take it back". I think this is the "new era" and I think we will just have to find ways to cope with this...

I just spoke to an illustrator friend of mine and I mentioned Lion. He said "Don't upgrade!! Don't!!". But it was too late...

A little edit: the system censored "d a m n". Is that even a swear word?

Wow, 41 pages and counting since day 1 of the release. I've just got over it. After dropping all concern, the feature is ubiquitous to my workflows. The only reason that I know it's there is because of this continuing thread. No one is going to get my harddrives, ever, unless they pry them from my cold dead hands. And if I am stupid enough to leave my laptop at the airport, so be it, I deserve to be punished like an idiot. Companies that are concerned should just stick to PCs, who really cares when so many people can get your data if they want to anyway? Stay offline and encrypt then firewall it all, afterwards, lock and anchor your machines to rebarb embedded in the wall.