Disable autosave

Some posters here mantioned Apple's inconsistent interpretation of it's own Human Interface Guidelines. That makes me wonder how many here (or at Apple, for that matter 🙂 ) have heard of Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini?

I'd love to know his opinion of some of the Lion interface elements.

Bruce Tognazzini made a wonderful work but, in French we say :

Les absents ont toujours tort !

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 8 août 2011 22:30:47

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 !

Tom and Yvan and friends,

Just imagine, as an example. That tomorrow Apple release the Lion 7.1 update featuring as the main improvement that Autosave is gone. The reason: "It was a feature that 90% of our users hate it", Apple would say.

I may guess you would feel betrayed and disappointed, since Autosave is a great feature for you, and now you would miss it.

I guess you would be posting like us, asking for the previous feature. We're not asking Autosave be banned from the OSX, it may be a very useful feature for beginners and many other people. But not for some of us, we may be a minority but this days, a 10% of Mac OSX users is a lot of people.

We want a switch to enable or disable it as we like it. That's it! After all, if I turn Autosave Off in my computer, it doesn't affects you at ANYTHING! so why be against it? It feels like a mac fanatism.

When the iPad comes out, the switch next to the volume control, was used for Lock the screen orientation. A later update changed the switch for Mute the sound. Many people was frustrated and many jailbreaked the iPad to get back the original switch function. Later Apple came with a new update where you decide which function will have that switch: Lock or Mute. That's exactly what we want now, a Switch to turn On/Off Autosave. Are we asking to much?

I want autosave to be optional. That's all. And I want Versions to be killed. Simple.

I agree. It should be user friendly. The simple user shouldnt be bothered by anything and the advanced or professional should have some essential options. Separately for autosave and versions.

.

Very Well said.

If they are still following that design rule, it would explain a lot, both with Lion and with FCPX. Why do you say its "old." Where did that come from? Is it official? Cheers 🙂

I gave the document's title, why aren't you searching by yourself in Bing, Google, Yahoo…?

No need to be a geek, even a five years old child may do that.

For those interested, here is a link about Bruce Tognazzini which was at the origin of the Guidelines :

http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/1862-q-a-bruce-tognazzini-on-human-computer-inte raction

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mardi 9 août 2011 11:05:43

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 !

lucafrombrooklyn wrote:

That Autosave must become an obligation, is crazy.

That's it in a nutshell.

The bottom line is that AutoSlave conducts destructive editing on documents. To me, this is nearly a data loss bug, as my original gets over-written by the application when after testing a new look to a table, or testing a re-sizing of a logo, or testing whatever with no plan whatsoever to implement those changes, all I do is close a window. At that point, the application springs to action and starts conducting destructive editing on my document despite my specific instructions not to do so. This is why I call it: AutoSlave.

And DUPLICATE is not a replacement for SAVE AS. Duplicate requires that the user rename the document and then manually move it to a new destination. Save As opens a work window that allows repositioning & renaming automatically. It was much more elegant, simplistic and quicker.

I am all for new ways of doing things... I'm always looking for ways to save time and do things faster. My motto is: Let's get it over with already! :-) But not if they're a step backwards in usability & demand more time and effort to accomplish the same thing.

AutoSlave. Telling you exactly what to do & how to behave since 2011 :-)

Thanks for the link, Yvan.

I have not read anything written by Bruce Tognazzini for many years. As far as I am concerned he is still right on target.

Hi,

I don't know if anyone else has this issue, but I too wish the autosave feature was optional in documents. Generally it is a great improvement if you have the option to turn it on an off. I have a large numbers spreadsheet that I developed to use for coffee roasting and all my coffee profiles are on this spreadsheet. I have it in Mobileme so that the other roasters who roast for me can use the same profiling spreadsheet and update it and save it so everytime someone accesses it, it is the latest version. I would have thought this was highly compatible with the uses iCloud is supposed to support.

Well, you try to use a document like this that is constantly autosaving to Mobileme - it takes about 20 seconds to save during which time the sheet is inaccessible and it happens about once every couple of minutes - INFURIATING!!

I know you can sync the spreadsheet to your local computer but we have tried that and it has caused all kinds of problems with wrong versions being overwritten.

APPLE - please make autosave optional so that in cases like this we can control our own editing.

By the way - I tried using the 'LOCK' function at the top and this is even more bizarre - you click on 'LOCK DOCUMENT' and as soon as you go to edit it, it does another long autosave and changes back to UNLOCKED.

This is abit of a mess

Thanks

David

Yes David - a serious mess. I have no idea what the people at Cupertino were thinking of when they decided to incorporate this new "feature". Needless to say the Apple fanboys think it's brilliant, but for those of us who have serious things to do and for whom our computer is a work tool and not an end in itself, this Autosave thing could drive us all away from the MacOS.

I apologize but from my point of view, installing a new operating system on machines used by those of us who have serious things to do and for whom our computer is a work tool and not an end in itself without testing before if the new beast fit the owner needs is just ridiculous.

Wasted time is too much expansive to take the risk of a catastroph linked to a new operating system.

As I am retired, I don't earn my life with my mac but I'm too serious to install Lion on my HD without testing it.

We are on 2011/08/09 and it's no longer on my main HD.

It's only on an external one which I run only for test.

To be short, many of you just played with matches … and you burnt your fingers.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mardi 9 août 2011 17:36:44

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 !

Well, some of us must live with decisions made by others in a company. I would not have moved to Lion so quickly but these decisions aren't mine.

Check this out:

http://www.downloadcrew.com/article/24127-lion_tweaks

This does a lot of nice things but it can't switch off Auto Slave, unfortunately.