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Disable autosave

Hello, anybody figured out how one can disable autosave? I just *don't* want it, and I have my reasons.

Thanks,


l.

Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Jul 21, 2011 10:30 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jul 21, 2011 10:32 AM

I don't think so.

696 replies

Aug 8, 2011 12:03 PM in response to KOENIG Yvan

KOENIG Yvan wrote:


Are you aware of this old Apple rule ?


++-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-++


Apple Human Interface Guidelines:

Apply the 80 Percent Solution

During the design process, if you discover problems with your product design, you might consider applying the 80 percent solution‚ that is, designing your software to meet the needs of at least 80 percent of your users. This type of design typically favors simpler, more elegant approaches to problems.

If you try to design for the 20 percent of your target audience who are power users, your design may not be usable by the other 80 percent of users. Even though that smaller group of power users is likely to have good ideas for features, the majority of your user base may not think in the same way. Involving a broad range of users in your design process can help you find the 80 percent solution.


+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+


I guess that you aren't in the targetted 80%, no less, no more.

In such case you must live with it or leave it. 😉


Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 8 août 2011 17:52:45

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.0

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

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


To be the AW6 successor, iWork MUST integrate a TRUE DB, not a list organizer !


That doesn't apply here.

Aug 8, 2011 12:04 PM in response to stefano67

Given what I read in threads like this one I'm not sure that the 20% are really able to learn something.


I no longer count messages explaining the way to replace Save As
 (like the one posted by DSLAlex) but it seems that this simple tip is really difficult to learn.


Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 8 août 2011 21:04:30

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.0

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

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


To be the AW6 successor, iWork MUST integrate a TRUE DB, not a list organizer !

Aug 8, 2011 12:06 PM in response to papalapapp

papalapapp wrote:


That doesn't apply here.


Why ?


Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 8 août 2011 21:05:50

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.0

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

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


To be the AW6 successor, iWork MUST integrate a TRUE DB, not a list organizer !

Aug 8, 2011 12:22 PM in response to papalapapp

>KOENIG Yvan wrote:

>

>Are you aware of this old Apple rule ?

>

>++-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-++

>

>Apple Human Interface Guidelines:

>Apply the 80 Percent Solution

>


Yvan: perhaps you are right but I don't think the 80% rule applies here. The problem with Autosave is that it is bad for any user who writes any document longer than 7 words for any lapse of time longer than say 2 hours, as finding the correct version you want requires you to read and compare ALL the saved versions by Autosave -- which does not even distinguish the versions you saved with the automatically saved versions.


I bet if it does not make up the 80% of the users, it's getting pretty close. Incidentally there are very many other violations of AHI in Lion, as well as a general inconsistency of some parts of the interface. So IMHO what happened is that these issues have not been thought through completely, under the pressure of exploiting the iPad wave to attract new users to the platform. Even these usere won't make up the 80% of the users, though.


My two cents.

Aug 8, 2011 12:35 PM in response to lucafrombrooklyn

We are in a 14 pages thread and you continue to fail to make the difference between AutoSave and Versions.


I already wrote several times that the AutoSave features is an answer to the numerous users which were complaining in forums with messages like "It's a disaster, I was working for hours on a document, I never saved and the app quitted. Please tell me how I will recover my work"


My one and only problem with Autosave and Versions is that I don't guess what they will offer if the main document become corrupted which is not a rare behavior with iWork.


Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 8 août 2011 21:34:58

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.0

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

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


To be the AW6 successor, iWork MUST integrate a TRUE DB, not a list organizer !

Aug 8, 2011 12:51 PM in response to papalapapp

Yvan says he has seen numerous users complaining in forums and saying "It's a disaster, I was working for hours on a document, I never saved and the app quit. Please tell me how I will recover my work"


There can only be ONE forum where messages like that are being posted: the iWork forum. Only Apple iWork does not have an autosave function.


Every other application I can think of ALREADY HAS ITS OWN AUTOSAVE which the user can configure any way they want.


Since Yvan has been seeing so many of these complaints, perhaps he would like to post links to a few examples - maybe about 10 or so?

Aug 8, 2011 12:56 PM in response to Tom in London

Enter the Pages or the Numbers forum and search for the keyword "autosave".

I'm well aware of them because I often answered :

go to my iDisk and download my free AutoSave script 😉


Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 8 août 2011 21:56:42

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.0

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

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


To be the AW6 successor, iWork MUST integrate a TRUE DB, not a list organizer !

Aug 8, 2011 1:05 PM in response to Tom in London

Yvan, Tom, and others: Yvan is an excellent contributor to many lists, as everybody who has posted on the iWork forums know (I have been helped by him in the past, actually). He also contributed to this thread with useful tips, So let's respect his opinion as I am sure he will respect others'.


That some users will be helped by Autosave (I doubt) is possible. That Autosave must become an obligation, is crazy. Yvan doesn't see problems and this is good for him. However, I do see problems, and in particular, in the very programs Yvan knows so well. For example, my Keynote has become much slower in my normal usage, which requires many substantial changes which I do not want to save. Autosave also interferes with the presentation of documents with unsaved changes (at least in my experience, making movies stutter). Why should I live with this? This is the point of asking Autosave to be optional. Removing the root directories with the changes is good but does not solve these problems. Saving versions with "duplicate" is possible but does not solve these problems.

Aug 8, 2011 1:17 PM in response to lucafrombrooklyn

There is no reason to get slower presentations. Here is my tip : duplicate your presentations and replace the duplicate's extension name .key by .kth. When you need to show it to attendees, don't run azertyuiop.key, run azertyuiop.kth As it will be a never saved document, Autosave will not interfere with your work.

Something like Christopher Columbus egg 😉



Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 8 août 2011 22:16:21

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.0

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

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


To be the AW6 successor, iWork MUST integrate a TRUE DB, not a list organizer !

Disable autosave

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