Disable autosave

Tom in London:

1. Re discussion forums: I agree, if you're reading a page and then have to log in, the discussion forums should bring you back to the page you were looking at. Not doing this was acceptable in 1999, but we've come a long way since then.

2. Re Yvan: He is very knowledgable, but he also appears to be a fatalist, of the "que sera, sera" sort. He may be right that Apple is continue going in its own direction for Lion, but that does not make us wrong for wanting our needs to be considered. Asking for change may not bear fruit, but that doesn't mean you should passively accept whatever comes.

Do you remember the first iOS versions with mandatory AutoCorrect?

I am Italian but I need to send messages in English or French. With that autocorrect it was a mess.

People asked for the possibility to disable it and one day Apple gave us a switch. Those who find it useful keep it active. I don't.

I believe nobody wants Apple to throw away Autosave and Versions (well... I would, together with Duplicate, Launchpad and Mission Control, but that's another story). I believe many Pro users would like the choice to turn it off. Keep it on by default upon installation but please provide a little tiny switch.

By the way, I moved back to MS Office now and I notices something interesting. I moved away soe years ago when they introduced the half-screen-high-ribbon in aal the Office applications. I hate it.

Now, in Office 2011, users can keep or remove the ribbons. Our choice. Is Microsoft smarter than Apple?

Apples strategy and policies are the one thing. The other thing is what bothers me most: Why, why, why do they roll out a software/feature like this?

Didn't they try it out themselves?

Don't they use iWork themselves or are they on Office? They don't work with shared documents on servers? (I'm seriously curious what they use inside Apple)

Didn't they recognise that this is a clumsy unproductive way to work? -> quickly saving a copy of a file? -> having a wrong "last saved" date?

Why would they think that people would find this way of working better?

Don't they have professionals that think about that beforehand? Or are their skills/views really limited to engineers focussing soley on the technical part of coding...?

Annoying isn't it? But what is currently irritating me is that when I click on the oxymoronically labelled 'USA English' button (USA is the default despite my Mac being set to London!) at the bottom RHS of this page and set UK English, it takes me to Apple's UK pages and not back here! After the weary plod back here, guess what - it's still set to 'USA English'...grrrr!

I usually need to change the codification of text files. It was easy to do that with TextEdit, using "Save As" and overwriting the original file with a new codification. Now, I have to:

1- Duplicate the file

2- Save the file (then you can specify the codification)

3- Go to a Finder window and delete the old file

4- Rename the new file

Please, a switch in TextEdit and Preview and all Apple apps for disabling this stuff. Maybe it's cool for novices, but it's a serious problem for power users.

As a followup to my previous post, I've just decided to completely drop TextEdit on my Lion iMac. I've replaced it with TextWrangler. I've configured all txt files to open in TextWrangler, and I've dragged TextEdit out of the dock. It's a pity because I love Apple apps, but not this way Apple, not this way.

I was amazed when I discovered the useful advanced stuff you could do with PDF files on Preview (merging pdf files, extracting pages, and so on, in the simplest way you could ever imagine). Now I'm on the way of finding a substitute for Preview. Too sad, I really _loved_ Preview.

WRONG

The true scheme is :

1- Duplicate the file

2- Save the file with the wanted name and the wanted location

3- Go to a Finder window and delete the old file only if you have no longer need for it.

In this case, it may be more efficient to use an alternate one :

(1) From the Finder, duplicate the original file

(2) rename the duplicate as you want

(3) open the replicate, work on it, save it when finished.

And last not least, the scheme which I use for years (even if some users it dislike it).

I change my original file into a template/stationary (from the info window)

So, when I want to create a variant of this file,

(1) open the template which create a new document

(2) work on it and save it when you want, the name you want, the location you want.

Absolutely no wasted time.

Just need to think a bit before complaining.

I always thaught that self defined 'power users' are able to do that, am'I wrong ?

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) vendredi 21 octobre 2011 13:28:15

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

And I thought one-step save-as was quicker than three-step-smartass method.

Your post made me wonder what happens, if I wanted to save a file and overwrite another one. E.g. there is file 1 and I am working on file 2 as an alternative and decide to save this as file 1. If File 1 is open in a window, Pages will create a new file called "backup of 1" (in German: Sicherungskopie von 1). So now you have an additional space-eating file cruising around on your HD that you actually don't need. And in some cases maybe dont even want!

Pre-Lion the user was notified that "1" was changed and could choose to keep the changes or not.

Duplicate-o-mania.

KOENIG Yvan wrote:

WRONG

The true scheme is :

1- Duplicate the file

2- Save the file with the wanted name and the wanted location

3- Go to a Finder window and delete the old file only if you have no longer need for it.

Woa!! If you duplicate a file, and save it with the same name as the original, you get two windows with the same file!! No complain, no warning, no explanation of what's going on. Really intuitive :-( This looks like Linux a couple of decades ago.

KOENIG Yvan wrote:

In this case, it may be more efficient to use an alternate one :

(1) From the Finder, duplicate the original file

(2) rename the duplicate as you want

(3) open the replicate, work on it, save it when finished.

How do you change the codification of the duplicate if TextEdit no longer has "Save As"? The option to change the codification is only in the Save dialog, and you can only access the Save dialog when you use Duplicate from TextEdit, not Finder.

KOENIG Yvan wrote:

And last not least, the scheme which I use for years (even if some users it dislike it).

I change my original file into a template/stationary (from the info window)

So, when I want to create a variant of this file,

(1) open the template which create a new document

(2) work on it and save it when you want, the name you want, the location you want.

How can I use a template if I want to change the codification of an existing file?

KOENIG Yvan wrote:

Absolutely no wasted time.

You're kidding, right? First the time in think how can you access the Save dialog. Then the extra mouse clicks needed, as well as the need to type the file name when saving it (or at least delete the "copy" suffix, which requires mouse and/or keyboard work).

KOENIG Yvan wrote:

Just need to think a bit before complaining.

I always thaught that self defined 'power users' are able to do that, am'I wrong ?

Well, just tell me how can I change the codification of a text file with TextEdit with the same simplicity as always: I just needed to click on "File>Save as", choose the new codification and accept the dialog. Can you get any close to this?

May you explain what's the meaning of "change the codification", it seams that I misunderstood that.

As you wrote that after saving a file whose codification was changed you had to delete the old one, I understood that you were changing the file name.

On the other hand, it seems that you don't understand what's a template.

When we 'open' such a file, it's not really opened, it create a new document with the same contents.

So we may apply every changes then save the deited file with the wanted name.

As all my TextEdit stationaries are named something like

azerty™.txt, qsdfg™.rtf or wxcv™.rtfd (I use ™ to flag the stationaries)

there is no problem.

The newly created file is named untitled and I save it with the wanted name. which may be :

azerty.txt, qsdfg.rtf or wxcv.rtfd

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) vendredi 21 octobre 2011 14:40:13

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

He just wanted to save the file as a different format - on the fly - without creating addtional files. That's not possible anymore.

The closest way I can think of is:

1. Duplicate the file while open

2. Close the "old" window (top left corner)

3. Save the file and overwrite the old one.

Since 10.7.2. the keyboard-shortcut assigned manually to "duplicate" actually work. So instead of shift-cmd-S one could use shift-cmd-D.

But the jumping second window still remains and if you forget to close the old window before saving the new one, Lion will create a new file wilth the old content.

Just pause for a moment and look back at the previous 8 or so posts and consider this:

Is any of this really the kind of thing that you want to be thinking about at 03:00 am when you are tired & stressed and working to a deadline trying to get the job done and you simply don't have time in your life for error and confusion?

It certainly has no place in any real-world OS that I want to be working with!

Thanks

At this time I'm working with AppleWorks in 10.6.8 so I can't check but, as far as I know, the share menu is available in Lion so :

open a file

Share > Export > choose the wanted format does the trick which you describe.

File > Export > choose the wanted format does the trick which you describe does exactly the same job.

I'm always wondering how self-defined "power users" are unable to open their eyes.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) vendredi 21 octobre 2011 16:24:18

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

KOENIG Yvan wrote:

I'm always wondering how self-defined "power users" are unable to open their eyes.

Yvan, your knowledge of scripting and workarounds is welcome, but your attitude is not. You actually sound a lot like a die-hard Windows user dismissing Mac users dislike of Windows by implying that they're just too stupid to be able to use it properly. The greatest, but rather intangible benefit of Mac OS has always been that it helps the user to get where they want to go and steers them around any pitfalls along the way. Autosave increases the chance of you accidentally overwriting a file if you forget to lock it, and makes it somewhat more cumbersome to "Save As..." Both are very un-Mac-like changes.

I don't know why you're so invested in this that you've spent 26 pages telling people how wrong they are to be upset that their workflow has increased from one step to three or four, with some risk for data loss. But such posts are a huge waste of your time and ours. Please stick to helping people work around the situation and leave the attitude out of it.

To be frank, Microsoft got this right with Office, and they did it 10 years ago. I really don't know what Apple was thinking.