Q: How to disable Versions completely

I'm going to stop arguing with *some people* in this discussion since they seem to have decided my issues with auto-save and versions is all about *them.*  Again, not my intention.

The reason I posted here is to find out if anyone had a workaround to disable these new features.

I guess not.  Sad.

By the way, I've discovered something else "broken" in Lion, although I wouldn't be surprised if it returned in a future update.

I would frequently use Command-D to select "Don't Save" in the dialog boxes I'd get when closing a Photoshop document. But that keyboard command doesn't seem to work anymore. >Sigh<

So now I can't save without generating extra versions, and I can not NOT save from the keyboard.

If Adobe adopts this Versioning foolishness, I'm screwed. I frequently need derivatives of artwork for presentations, websites, etc. I don't want to change the base document, just generate some alternative output. *That* will really damage my calm.

ChrisEsch wrote:

 

By the way, I've discovered something else "broken" in Lion, although I wouldn't be surprised if it returned in a future update.

 

I would frequently use Command-D to select "Don't Save" in the dialog boxes I'd get when closing a Photoshop document. But that keyboard command doesn't seem to work anymore. >Sigh<

Command-D seems to work fine here.

So now I can't save without generating extra versions, and I can not NOT save from the keyboard.

You know don't you that Photoshop doesn't support versions. New Apple applications do and I think the Omni applications now do, but don't quote me on that.

If Adobe adopts this Versioning foolishness, I'm screwed. I frequently need derivatives of artwork for presentations, websites, etc. I don't want to change the base document, just generate some alternative output. *That* will really damage my calm.

You don't have to use Versions if you don't want to. Just let Autosave do its work. I would say that Versions is just what you need to generate alternative output.

I don't know what Adobe's plans are. Microsoft is going to add support for Versions and Autosave. But, of course, Microsoft has been doing Autosave for years and even tried versions but couldn't make it work.

etresoft wrote:

 

 

ChrisEsch wrote:

 

 

Look, not being able to control when I save is taking power AWAY from the user.

 

Utter nonsense. You are upset because Apple is taking away your right to avoid data loss?

Wow...unbelievable. Etresfoft, you have a bright future ahead of you in the field of spin doctoring for political hacks.

For Mac users who have engaged in responsible computing practices for the last several decades (i.e., have mastered the enormously difficult task of keying Command-S from time to time), "data loss" is not an issue. If it ever is an issue, it is their issue.

Put another way, if at times over the years I have failed to save my work as dilligently as I should have and have lost data, then shame on ME. I don't blame my operating system for failing to save me from my own stupidity.

ChrisEsch has it exactly right...it's about control. And you can engage in all manner of convoluted reasoning to paint it another way, but that's what it is. If you believe that some faceless operating system will always know what you want to do with your files better than you yourself do, then you have indeed drunk a megadose of the worst sort of Kool-Aid.

TEST QUESTION #1: You enroll in online bill payment through your bank. You put in all the various merchants/utilities etc. you have to pay every month. Then you go in at a time of your choosing and allocate your chosen amount of payment to each. One month, out of the blue, the system suddenly automatically allocates money from your account (in amounts it chooses) to these various creditors, without your authorization. This happens to occur to you in a month when money is a little tight. You were hoping to pay only those creditors whom you know demand a minimum payment every month, while letting others who are more forgiving slide for a month. Are you happy? Or are you perhaps feeling that your finances are suddenly beyond your control?

TEST QUESTION #2: (This is the one I've asked repeatedly in many forums such as these over the past few months. I've yet to get anything that's within miles of a straight answer to it.) What would be wrong with a scenario in which Lion 10.7.3 is released with Auto Save/Versioning/Duplicate as the default — but with it capable of being disabled in System Preferences in favor of the scheme that has been in place on the Macintosh platform since 1984? (Specific answers with concrete examples of the horror that would ensue, please.)

I think you're trying too hard here:

Microsoft has been doing Autosave for years and even tried versions but couldn't make it work.

Microsoft has supported auto save on Office files. I can't speak for (for example) Visual Studio, being a Java-centric person but they don't do it across the patch, neither is it engineered into the operating system. I give you Notepad - which does not auto-save - and paint (likewise). If I fired up my Windows 7 or XP VMs I could probably find a lot more Microsoft applications that work with files but do not auto-save them..

The point about Office is that you can choose. You can choose:

• Whether to auto-save at all,
• How often to auto-save, and
• Whether to keep a backup of the original when you manually save.

According to Microsoft themselves, on their own Office site:

Sometimes a Microsoft Office program closes before you can save changes to a file you are working on. Some possible causes include:

• A power outage occurs.
• Your system is made unstable by another program.
• Something goes wrong with the Microsoft Office program itself.

Although you can't always prevent problems such as these from happening, you can take steps to protect your work when an Office program closes abnormally.

They then go on to explain how auto-save and auto-recover work. The objective behind Office auto-save is rather different to that engineered into Lion so you can't compare the two and claim they are equals. Further, Office will still prompt you to save on exit if you have unsaved changes.

I found Track Changes - a kind of versioning, after all - to be extremely useful when I worked in big companies, it allowed me to see who was changing what in the documents I was supposed to own. But, again, this was optional and on a file-by-file basis and I chose when to start a new version (by accepting all the changes in the current one).

The only file system I've used which comes close to Lion's versions (but not autosave) was the one in VMS. Every time you saved a file it created a new version - file names ended with a semicolon and a number so you could have "fred.txt;1" and "fred.txt;2". If you just referred to "fred.txt" you got the latest version. DEC allowed you to specify a system-wide default number of versions to keep, which could then be over-ridden at user level, and then at file level. VMS also gave you the ability to purge versions when you chose, to change the number of versions to keep - at any time - and generally make decisions for yourself.

In all three of these examples the user has been left to choose what functionality to use, and what functionality to turn off. Giving the user a choice and putting the power in their hands - rather than adopting a "nanny knows best" attitude and deciding for you.

Nice one:

TEST QUESTION #2 ... What would be wrong with a scenario in which Lion 10.7.3 is released with Auto Save/Versioning/Duplicate as the default — but with it capable of being disabled in System Preferences ...

In my personal opinion as a user: nothing.

In my professional opinion as a software engineer of over 20 years standing and having worked on a wide variety of operating systems and software projects from the truly huge to the very small: nothing.

Apple would, I fear, like us to know less about what goes on in our machines than we would like:

• No option to view free disk space at the bottom of every finder window - irritating when you empty the trashcan and can't see how much spacve you've just freed up.
• Multi-core CPUs shown as a single CPU graph in Activity Monitor - very irritating for software developers working on multi-threaded software - you can't see how the workload is being distributed between CPU cores.

If the user is conditioned not to care about these things then they won't be comparing (excuse me) apples to apples when they buy their next PC, tablet or phone. They want people to think "Apple or Samsung?". Remember they don't make a big song and dance about the technical specifications of the iPhone or the iPad - in terms of (for example) CPU speed and working memory. Some of the key benchmarks the more clued-up people judge hardware by. They want people to think "iPhone 4s with Siri" not "dual core processor running at 800MHz with 512Mb of memory" - especially when the competition are about to release 1.2GHz and 1.5GHz processor-based devices with 1Gb of working memory and aren't afraid to shout about it.

While you can argue that it isn't the numbers that count, its the way the device performs, how well it works - well the hardware is a key factor in that. If two devices seem, to all intents and purposes, to be equal in function and the same price - would you buy the one with the better hardware specification? Frankly I'm suspicious of any company when they don't want to trot out the numbers around a piece of hardware and lets face it, if those numbers were good, you'd hear about it. Apple like to tell us how many devices they've sold as much as other companies would rather not talk about quantities at all, but other 'good' numbers such as price or battery life.

• No option to view free disk space at the bottom of every finder window - irritating when you empty the trashcan and can't see how much spacve you've just freed up.

This is from a (random) finder window on 10.7.2 on my iMac:

Doesn't the part where it says "380.81 GB Available" indicate your free disk space?

Unbelieveable indeed. I'm just blown away at the idea that people would actually complain about being liberated from the possibility of data loss and the drudgery of having to save.

Your test question #1 is ridiculous and doesn't even merit a reply.

Your test question #2 would require s significant redesign of the NSDocument architecture. It was designed to be as easy as possible for developers to use. If it can be turned off, then developers then need to deal with two different modes of operation. They already have to make changes to support Lion. Those changes would then be more difficult. Developers would have to test their software in both modes. Is this a reasonable solution for the unreasonable demands of a few people?

Yes, I know that - my reply was to show it to surfsoft who complained that  there was no option to view free disk space. I did forget to put his post in quotes (the first paragraph in my post).

etresoft wrote:

 

Unbelieveable indeed. I'm just blown away at the idea that people would actually complain about being liberated from the possibility of data loss and the drudgery of having to save.

"Being liberated from the possibility of data loss" comes at a price that at least some users find is not worth paying. Said users have clearly articulated their reasons for feeling this way. Kool-Aid drinkers dismiss them with a wave of the hand.

Meanwhile, I'll leave it to others to chime in on which of the two of these better fits the definition of "drudgery":

1) Keying Command-S with one's thumb and forefinger every so often.

2) The steps that one now has to take in Lion to accomplish what Save As used to do in every Mac OS that preceded it.

Your test question #1 is ridiculous and doesn't even merit a reply.

Translation: "I have no answer for the entire issue of 'control' that has been raised here, so to avoid the discomfort of dealing with it I'll just ignore it and hope nobody notices."

Your test question #2 would require s significant redesign of the NSDocument architecture. It was designed to be as easy as possible for developers to use. If it can be turned off, then developers then need to deal with two different modes of operation. They already have to make changes to support Lion. Those changes would then be more difficult. Developers would have to test their software in both modes.

And yet the developer of Graphic Converter, which to my knowledge has always been pretty much a one-man operation, has in the latest iteration of his software already introduced just such an option. It seems he didn't find this so overwhelmingly difficult.

It seems he also understands that keeping 100 percent of his user base happy is preferable to ******* off a percentage of them.

As the iWork Suite is an in-house Apple product, it would seem to me that its "developers" would have the easiest time of all accommodating this dual mode of operation.

Is this a reasonable solution for the unreasonable demands of a few people?

Your "unreasonable" assessment is entirely subjective. Further, your use of "few" is completely unsupported and constitutes a wild guess on your part. None of us can reliably know the breakdown between those who think Auto Save/Versioning is the bee's knees and those who don't like it.

Your translation is incorrect. What I said is pretty much all I can say without language that most people would find...unproductive.

Just because one software developer wants to do extra work doesn't mean that Apple should impose that requirement on all developers. Adding full Lion support is optional. If it is too difficult, developers won't support it. Apple's goal is to make the system as easy as possible to use and develop for. If individual users want to make their lives more difficult, they are free to do so. Thorsten Lemke can do extra work if he wants. If you want to do extra work, you can use old software such as Snow Leopard, Windows, or Linux.

You cannot claim to be under the control of an optional system. If you don't like it, don't use it. It is Apple's software. You, as a licensee, have no right to tell Apple what to do with its property. All you can do is refuse to pay for new licenses. If enough people do that, then Apple might make a change to get more customers. Apple's focus, however, is more about making great products than attracting the maximum number of customers.

It's good that MS Word 2011, Excel 2011, Photoshop CS3.5, InDesign CS5, Final Cut Express, REALBasic are conventional, with Save As... I avoid the Versions/Autosave thing by not using any application that has it.

etresoft wrote:

 

You, as a licensee, have no right to tell Apple what to do with its property.

But I think I do have a right to tell Apple not to take any action that affects my property or my work in general.

The files I create are my property (or in certain circumstances, my employer's or my clients' property). They are certainly not Apple's property.

Those files are necessary for my work. What I do to them, which includes saving them or duplicating them, or not, is none of Apple's business.

I certainly would not authorise Apple to alter or interfere with any of my property (or my employer's or my clients' property) without my express authorisation on a case-by-case basis.

This is a practical point of great immediacy that I suggest has clear legal ramifications.

A number of case studies have already been posted in these threads in relation to the unauthorised and unexpected manipulation of image files in ways that were not desired and not authorised by the owners of those files.

No doubt there could be many other exemplary cases.

Tom in London wrote:

 

etresoft wrote:

 

You, as a licensee, have no right to tell Apple what to do with its property.

But I think I do have a right to tell Apple not to take any action that affects my property or my work in general.

 

The files I create are my property and are necessary for my work. Whether I save them or not is none of Apple's business and I certainly would not authorise Apple to make copies of them and store them on my system, or make them available to third parties.

 

But this is a legal point and so far I haven't seen any credible legal eagles in here, discussing it.

And yet you hit 'Agree' when you install a system, and have obviously not read through all terms and conditions properly and what Apple find you responsible for in using their software, etc. etc. etc.  But people still hit agree. I think Apple are clever enough to have themselves covered over these issues. As for seeing Legal Eagles here, Tom, I really do not know where you think you are. This is a user to user forum and.....oh that's right, you have been told this many many times but still prefer to believe this is Apple's feedback forum. Try

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Neil from Oz wrote:

what Apple find you responsible for in using their software

 

Who owns my files?

Apple?