Disable autosave

Hopeless case.

Indeed.

Absolutely.

If your time to you

Is worth savin'

Then you better start Swimmin'

Or you'll sink like a stone

For the times they are a-changin'.

thanks to Bob Dylan

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 5 septembre 2011 21:35:30

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

OK, let's try the other way.

Apple is good, Lion is perfect anf Yvan is so smart.

But, is there a way to turn Autosave/Versions off?

Or is there going to be a way in one of next OS updates?

Any news around?

I can report that the recent Lion update of Graphic Converter has the Autosave option turned OFF by default. The user can turn it on if they want to.

So there is hope out there.

The Microsoft Office Team confirmed in a comment in their block, that they are aware of our concerns regarding Autosave. The current version of Office 2011 does not use autosave, they will implement it in future, but with some luck it stays optional:

http://blog.officeformac.com/more-news-on-office-for-mac-2011-and-mac-os-x-10-7- lion/#comment-4172

So my workaround is:

- Use Textwrangler instead of TextEdit

- Use Microsoft Office 2011 instead of iWork

I still don't have a good replacement for Preview, so my hope is that Apple will provide us a switch in preferences as well.

Also Acrobat Reader and Xee instead of Preview.

Yvan,

You appear to making the common mistake of interpreting criticism of the product as criticism of the creator. No one has said that Apple engineers or designers are idiots, and there is no reason for you (or anyone else) to take criticism of this feature as a personal insult.

It is fairly clear from this discussion that there are implementation issues to be resolved; it cannot have been the original intention that typing a word in an iWorks document causes a 10-second lockup as the file is backed up. Moreover, it seems equally clear that there are use cases for which this AutoSave feature is detrimental, and the user ought to be able to choose when to have this functionality turned on or off. I can admit these things and still like my Mac. Nothing is perfect, and acceptance or rejection is not all-or-nothing.

I apologize but when a group of beings deliver a product deserving the descriptor : idiotic, it must necessarily be at least some idiotics persons in the design team.If the team didn't embedded such members, an idiotic product would not reach the 'distribution' door. It would remain in the closets or in the trash.

The choices mare in the iWork implementation of Lion's feature are perfect.

The problem is not the change introduced by Lion.

If I was you, I would shout THANK YOU !

The perfect changes bring to surface the huge design flaw striking iWork apps since their first release.

The apps are rebuilding the entire index.xml file after each change, even one character change.

This is why iWork apps are the first ones after a practice of computers starting with Apple ][+ which I must wait while typing.

I repeat that for years but it had no echo.

Now, thanks to Lion and its new features, it appears in the crude light.

Each version of an iWork document contains at least a complete index.xml file.

Same thing when the app autosave so, some of you discover what they missed for years.

To push documents on iCloud, apps are supposed to send small chunks of datas describing only what was changed.

iWork apps are unable to do that.

My own understanding is that the design team knew perfectly what it was doing.

He knew that the implementation of the new features would reveal the wrong design and that this done, they will be given the resources required to rebuild quite from scratch.

To work correctly with iCloud, at least as it was described in the late keynote and in the technical sessions, apps must drop their old monolithic documents and replace them by documents made of bricks which may easily be modified and sent in the clouds. For sure, this push old guys like me to think to the aborted "open doc" scheme.

Here guys are ranting against iWork 9.1. It's perfect. I draw oil on the fire and it worked. Perfect.

If these threads reach the workspace one infinite loop, it would be perfect.

Engineers will have concrete datas to oppose to decidors for which 10 hours of development are 10 wasted hours.

iWork was designed to replace a product in which every instruction was heavily thought, nothing was asked to the microprocessor if it wasn't double checked that there was no faster way to do it.

This wonderful tool was replaced by three drafts of application, no more that proof of concept. Nothing is optimized. Have you ever tried to use the Search tool in Numbers on a document with a table of 20 columns of 1000 rows ? You must wait the machine after every character typed in the search field.

My understanding is that this era must necessarily end between today and january 2012.

You are shouting against Version and AutoSave. What will you do went the Cloud wil be delivered ?

At this time, when I want to push a screenshot to my iDisk it requires more than one minute. I was never able to push a Pages document in less than five minutes.

This will no longer be acceptable with the iCloud service. Decidors will be forced to give resources to build efficient tools, not bells and whistles distributors.

I don't understand what may be detrimental in an Autosave feature applied to a well designed application and it's why I repeats here and there.

The features are fine. What's wrong are the hosting apps but I don't understand how all of you you missed that.

Autosave is required as far as a firm decide to deliver computing to the rest of us. Here, even those claiming that they aren‘t interested in technology, more or less, we are geeks. We know that we must save what we are doing because computers aren't perfect tools, because electricity providers aren't perfect and even because us, yes these knowledgeable "us", we are far from perfect.

Twenty years ago, I made a typo while typing a command in an Assembly app. It destroyed the contents of the Syquest crtridge containing the source which I built to localize AppleWorks GS. I was unhappy but I said : no problem, I have a replicate.

Alas two days before I made an error and used the backup to backup an other cartridge.

I was forced to redo the entire disassembly of the beast. Happily it was a second nature and I was able to do the trick quite with eyes wide closed.

I promised that I will never redo that.

But I don't count the number of times when a guy like me, aware of potential failures, 'forgot' to duplicate or triplicate a file because trying to solve a problem is much more interesting than replicating datas.

So, a tool doing the job for me is welcome. A tool which may be disabled is useless. As far as I know we have no choice to remove safety belts in motorcar or aeroplanes.

In hour houses, we are no longer allowed to use the old fuses in which my grand father inserted a coper wire because this son of a b… of lead wire which was fusing too often.

I worked 30 years as a potter but I studied to build bridges. Doing that, I learnt tha safety devices make sense only if we can't disable them.

How many machines are set to allow automatic opening of "safe files". As mac users, we are lucky. We are so few that virus designers aren't interested by our micro society (I don't use the word community because I hate it).

In this thread and in others about the same theme.

Most writers (you see, I don't write 'ranters' even if I think to it) appears to be unable to make the difference between Autosave and Versions.

Autosave is designed to save the entire document as it is at a given instant.

Versions is designed to save different stage of the conception of a document. It resemble to what I did with my autosave scripts : save consecutive versions of documents. I didn't do that to be able to retrieve ol versions but to retrieve an openable file when the more recent one prove to be unreadable.

I was astounded after reading and rereading threads about Versions to see that knobody wrote about the major design flaw. As well as the 'main' document is in good health, we may reach its versions.

If the doc become corrupted. Nada, Apple doesn't offer a tool allowing us to enter the stored versions to extract a viable document.

More astoundingt, when I posted tools allowing to fill the gap, I assumed that there will be comments asking for this or that enhancement because I'm not fool enough to think that what I do in my retired house is perfect.

Nada, no comment, I worked for nothing.

The important point is to spend hours to discuss a feature which is supposed to require one more click than the other one. You will be able to work for years to spend in clicks what was spent in this threads.

But I'm glad to see that. I repeat, I assume that Apple will be forced to redesign iWork.

Oops I was forgotting an important detail : a large set of the reported oddities with Autosave and Versions is related to users wanting to save on networks but telling that only after several exchanges.

Deliberate design or temporary omission, I don't know but we must live with it : neither AutoSave nor Versions apply to networks. I was said that it was already true with Time Machine. I can't check I never networked my machine. No link between a machine and the rest of the world is the best firewall and antivirus ever designed.

OK. I wrote in a perfect disorder my reflections about the situation.

As far as I know, every Lion user choose to be one. In the world, there are much more beings suffering of diseases which they didnt choose.

Some of you think that the new scheme bring click wasting. I apologize but all your clicks are nothing compared to a well publicised rape.

Nothing in common ?

For sure. I just wished to claim that there are diseases and DISEASES.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mardi 6 septembre 2011 22:32:47

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

Iunderstand the gist of your thread your calling attention to some problems inthe functionality of Lion and saying that its the fault of the decision makers based on the costs of actually developing something that actually Works better.That’s normal although condonable

You lost me when you compare the loss of “Save as” and the need to do more clicks to that of world disease and rape or comparing the possibility of turning off some of these features to removing your safety belt whilst driving. No one here at these forums is discussing world peace I am just here because I like “save as”, its quick, very effective and I cant think of a valid reason for removing it. As I said onanother thread I dont mind versions/autosave ( i dont like it but i dont mind it!) however I dont seen any advantage of duplicate over save as. Maybe you as a programmer can suggest one to me.

You wrote about an occasion where duplicate would have been useful for yourself but the autosave/versions would have resolved your problem as it saves a copy of your file at certain intervals so you could retrieve a previous version of your work. By clicking duplicate your not saving a version until you actually exit the duplicate and rename it...in other words your actually doing facsimile of a save as but with extra work.

Save as=with one click you alter the name of the file, decide where you want it and save it. No mess no versioning no preview no duplicate, its just one simple step. I understand that you have more insight than I do on Lion OSX but Im the one buying the hardware/software so it’s the chicken and the egg argument who comes first! For me the loss save as and the extra click on duplicate is annoying to say the least Im not comparing it to the tragic problems of the world but my (and others) purchasing decisions will be based on the likes and dislikes and functionality of the software and in this case the hardware also.

My biggest issue with Versions, if you open a file to look at its content the original creation date is changed. It is a useless unneeded feature for experienced computer users.

Constant wirtes and read to find the "latest" version the operaton is mind boggling. further if the creation date for a legal docment changed you now have a useless file in your posession that has no legal benefit..

This very idea failed miserably in the 80-90 not sure why the the mind set is to force the change yet again..

While Lion performce is peppier than SL, the "i"TOY menatllity destroys any inherent usefulness, I went back to SL my MBP runs cooler since the drive is not constantly bombarded with reads and uncessary writes.

Apple may yet get it right and make Versions an option for those who find that level of handholding a comfort. and for those of us that understnad the need to save our work or at least backup can disable Versions.

When they get it it right I may try Lion again.

My $.02.

I already wrote several time that several ways are available to accomodate Lion's features.

It seems that there is no official policy because if iWork, Preview and TextEdit received the Save… & Duplicate scheme, xTools kept Save & Save As… but received a new Duplicate item.

I don't know which criterias were applied to bring those different choices.

I also already wrote that I may easily imagine a scheme in which triggering a Sava AS… item would duplicate the current document and save the replicate with a new name.

But this scheme doesn't answer your main problem : it would embed the changes in the main document.

For me the problem doesn't exists because for years, I store files used as starting points for new documents as templates. This way, I have no need to trigger replicate and the changes which I apply aren't stored in the source document.

In an other thread, when I wrote that, Kurt Lang responded that we can't change every files into templates giving the example of pictures files.

I checked and using a picture file as a template isn't a problem. It just requires to check a box.

This done, when we open the doc, we get a new copy.

I never open a picture file when I wish to insert it in a Textedit or an iWork document, I just drag and drop it.

If I wan't to look at it's contents before inserting, I use Quick Look.

As inserting via drag and drop apply also to files treated as templates, I may define every files this way and what seems to be your main problem no longer strike.

More, behaving this way, at least for documents which don't require a long time to achieve them, the Autosave feature doesn't apply. It does only if we saved once (required to define a destination folder). In fact it's not really true because Autosave saves a copy of the work in progress but at this time I'm not sure of what it does with it :

(a) anticipate the Save request

(b) anticipate a possible crash so that it will be able to restore the state of the machine when we restart

???

So, I repeat that we are perfectly free to work without versioning and autosaving.

For me it requires absolutely no change and when I open a document which I will edit during more than ten minutes, I save it once and bingo, Autosave is activated.

For other users it just requires a really simple change in their way of use.

It's easy to build a script which will automatically rename iWork documents to change them into templates (I repeat that the only differece is the name externsion) and which will activate the mode "template" for other documents.

I will write one and post it here before midnight.

As you saw, In this message I discuss only the features, not their consequences upon the behavior of iWork apps. Lion isn't responsible of them.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mercredi 7 septembre 2011 16:58:48

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

That's fine for those who are able to work with template files, but not everyone works in that way.

For instance at this moment I happen to be translating a file out of one language into another and the only way to do that efficiently, retaining the same identical format in both languages, is to work on a copy of the original document, changing each word into the source language and then shifting bits of text around to make it "flow" in the target language.

With Apple's Autosave that would be a nightmare, which is why I am doing this job in Word 2008. I have set the preferences in Word to save my changes every 2 minutes, which is fine.

I do *not* need some Apple-determined Autosave to go saving and versioning my file with every change I make. That would seriously screw everything up for me.

So when MS does implement Autosave I hope, and PRAY, that they make it optional the way it always has been in MS Office. I never thought I'd be standing up for Microsoft but there you go - that's what Apple has achieved with Lion: Microsoft has suddenly become better than Apple.

As for MS Office, I just tried the 2011 version and noticed that the ugliest feature (for me - ribbons) can be switched off and can free some screen space.

That makes MS office usable for me and it provides some statistical functions (in Excel) that are not available in Numbers (e.g., solving linear programming problems).

I am going to (sadly) uninstall iWorks...