Disable autosave

Actually just to sum up my feelings about autosave. I work professionally, and usually have thousands of files I have to touch. Fortunately my tools dont use autosave and hopefully never will be (I rather doubt programming tools will fall into the autosave trap). But if they move over to the new system I have to move to another system.

Thats the hard reality. The closest system to what I need probably then again will be Linux.

But once going away from OSX why buying Apple at all then? Thats the question I will ask me at that stage. And I am probably not alone in this question then.

RicksonQ wrote:

- First; who has decided that there "should" be no difference between an open and a closed program or function? And why is not the user considered fit to make that decision for her- or himself? Who can decide that better than the user?

- Second; what is the rationale behind such a goal?

In fact, this is a major logical difference, therefore software programs must be made accordingly - and be capable of being opened and closed at will.

Apple team seems to wish to make iOS and OSX quite identical.

As far as I know, they are free to decide what they want to produce.

On the other side, we are free to decide if we agree and buy their new products or

decide that we disagree and don't buy these new products.

It's the common rule.

Vendors decide what they try to sell, customers decide what they want to buy.

Everything else is rant.

When I worked as a potter, when a visitor started saying "it would be better to do this piece with this or that change", I showed him the door without any kind of precautions.

I made what I wanted, the way I wanted.

As you see, I'm consistent along years.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) jeudi 11 août 2011 14:33:28

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 !

RicksonQ wrote:

papalapapp wrote:

----

"I am afraid that autosave will never be able to be turned off just like the autoquitting apps. The goal behind all that, I suspect, is that in future there will be no difference between an open and a closed app. Apps just will be there for the user. (In the Lion beta the indicators in the doc were turned off.)"

----

- First; who has decided that there "should" be no difference between an open and a closed program or function? And why is not the user considered fit to make that decision for her- or himself? Who can decide that better than the user?

- Second; what is the rationale behind such a goal?

In fact, this is a major logical difference, therefore software programs must be made accordingly - and be capable of being opened and closed at will.

Writing these answers does not mean that I support them. I'ts what I think they think.

- First; who has decided that there "should" be no difference between an open and a closed program or function?

>>> The Apple usability engineers, obviously.

And why is not the user considered fit to make that decision for her- or himself?

>>> Because one decision less for the user is one improvement more for the OS.

Who can decide that better than the user?

>>> The Apple software designers, obviously.

- Second; what is the rationale behind such a goal?

>>> Corporate strategy is the only answer I can see right now.

All this would be obsolete if there was a clear benefit from those new features. 😟

Werner P. wrote:

Fortunately my tools dont use autosave and hopefully never will be

Apple changed iWork '09 to enforce the new feature. I am very worried that other vendors update existing packages without giving the user an option. I bet I'll soon regret switching to the Mac App Store: You can't hide/skip updates.

Here is what I found (or at least what I believe I found):

Applications supporting Autosave/Versions do not save directly to the file system, but they use a system process called revisiond. You can find it in

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/GenerationalStorage.framework/Versions/A/Suppo rt/revisiond

It is possible to kill the process and avoit it to restart but in such a case not only versions autosave and versions are disable but it becomes also impossible to save a file in a normal way.

A possibility could consist in cracking the revisiond executable so that it only saves when the user press command-s and not otherwise...

papalapapp wrote:

Per Inge Oestmoen wrote:

"And why is not the user considered fit to make that decision for her- or himself?"

>>> Because one decision less for the user is one improvement more for the OS.

Comment: The more options, the more configurability a system has, the better it can be tailored to different needs and situations.

We should inform Apple about that fact.

Why aren't you reverting to iWork 9.0.5 which is supported by Lion ?

Why aren't you reverting to TextEdit 1.6 which is supported by Lion ?

I apologize, I didn't checked if Preview 5.0.3 is supported by Lion but I guess that it is.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) jeudi 11 août 2011 16:38:09

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 !

RicksonQ, I am totally with you on that. Sadly the trend is the other way round: The less options the easier it is to use, the more people will use it. Personally I consider this as a not so good concept. The optimum is somewhere inbetween: remove complexity but not funcionality.

But if OSX should work like iOS, there couldn't be any options to turn off autosave or autoquit. Otherwise it would not work.

I have tried to revert these apps back but not a great deal of success

When I put back the iWork apps from time machine they just hang (after it has asked what type of document you want to create), might be something that needs deleting first, unsure on this

TextEdit - This restored quite happily and works fine

Preview crahses upon launch when going back a version, it cant find library files

Same here, I also couldn't get the old iWork to run. For me the TextEdit downgrade is pointless now, I've already paid money for BBEdit. It looks like I also gotta buy MS Office. I'll switch back to SL if AS can't be turned off in the next update.

Marc - don't buy MSOffice 2011 because I believe it's going to be updated to function with Apple's Autosave.

Get Office 2008 - it's better than 2011 anyway.

And BTW these threads are driving me nuts. I keep getting sent back to the top of the thread, for no good reason....

Yesterdays I helped a Polish user which was bored because after the update 9.1, the Charts inspector use Portuguese messages when the app is supposed to use Polish..

She is running 10.7.

She reinstalled iWork (I say iWork, the package, I don't know for the apps bought from MAS) from the DVD then applied the updater 9.0.5 which she downloaded from my iDisk because Apple no longer deliver the updaters 9.0.4 and 9.0.5.

Now she is working with this version under Lion.

As far as I know, Time Machine does a bad work when we ask it to restore an old version of iWork apps because it restore only the applications files.

When the apps were bought as a single package, there are several files in other locations which must be restored too.

Pages 4.1 is unable to run with the set of shared files of version 9.0.5

And Pages 4.0.5 is unable to work with the set of shared files of version 9.1

These files are located this way:

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) jeudi 11 août 2011 18:09:20

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 in London wrote:

Marc - don't buy MSOffice 2011 because I believe it's going to be updated to function with Apple's Autosave.

Get Office 2008 - it's better than 2011 anyway.

(1) Mer.oSoft officially announced that they will deliver a version using the new features but they need some months to achieve the changes.

(2) Sadly, Office 2008 dropped the macros feature

At last, Office 2011 reintroduced them.

I would buy none of them but use LibreOffice.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) jeudi 11 août 2011 18:13:06

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 !

re: letting Apple know why we might want to turn off verions, here are my two cents:

For me, it is because autosave/versions will change the "Date Modified" for files even if you are opening a file just to view it and close it again. In fact, even if you use the revert to last saved feature, which will leave the document in its original state, the date modified still changes.

Why does this matter? Syncing. For example, if I'm sharing a Dropbox file with my assistant and we are both viewing the file without saving, because the "Date Modified" gets updated, Dropbox will attempt to sync the copies but end up with two conflicting copies because they have different "Date Modified" values. Apple's "Numbers" program will consider a file modified even if you just browse between different sheets, so any viewing of a document leads to re-syncing on Dropbox, and if more than one person is viewing you get conflicting copies even when you're not actually making any changes! Basically versions now prevents easy file sharing between computers.

So as excited as I am about versions, I would like to disable it for this reason, at least in my Dropbox folder.

I don't think any of that matters, as any sync of a versioned file will remove all versions. Try it. So in short, it's a workaround for disabling versions...don't want them, use chronosync or another sync tool and poof, gone...at least until you open the file again.

On this topic, I do believe that new apps can be coded to set autosave to none. See the user's guide for MindNode Pro. The screen cap shows an autosave preference. However, the app as currently shipped from the apple store does not include this feature. So apparently, developers are playing with this as we speak.