What happened to Save As?

Yvan:

I am really sorry and sad to hear that you actually asked apple to check them out.

Most professional developer/analyst(s) would have commended Graphic Converter's developer LEMKESOFT on doing such a neat smooth alternative while meeting everyone's requirements.

cheers elo

I'm not a professional developer.

LEMKESOFT didn't need to receive a message of mine, they are supposed to be aware of the rule.

If they wish to return in the list, they know what they must do.

The rule is the same for everybody selling thru the MAS.

Adobe never matched the mac OS X standards so I don't assume that they will match them more this time.

In fact, I wished to know if Apple was really decided to stick to the new scheme.

Now I know.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) samedi 14 avril 2012

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 12 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.3

My Box account is : http://www.box.com/s/00qnssoyeq2xvc22ra4k

speaking for myself, I have no intention of abandoning OS-X ... I suppose if that was my conclusion, I would not have been so devoted to this thread with the hope, if not expectation, that we can influence things in a future version update or patch. I suppose Apple can gauge dissatisfaction more readily if people leave and go elsewhere, but in my opinion, going to another OS is jumping froma frying pan into a fire, and even that is an unfair assessment of Lion. There are many, many benefits and we (now speaking for those who agree with me) just want the OS to be the best it can be.

I think much can be learned by discussing how the desktop computer is NOT a mobile device and should not be expected to behave like one.

I think much can be learned by discussing how the desktop computer is NOT a mobile device and should not be expected to behave like one.

Exactly! I've mentioned it before, but my similar take on that is my Mac is NOT a giant iPad, and I do not want it to behave like one. They are two very different types of computers with very different uses.

Dennis:

you are right on.

I for one is using the Ipad for a whole series of other things than my day to day activities.

I use it when I go to bed and can not sleep (angry birds) but far more important

I use it when I travel, see clients, potential clients use it to show them what I can offer in the arts (my life in the past few years). Look at invoices, inventory lists. (Bento) etc..... Evernote fantastic take an image of anything save it and it is available.... take a photo of an invoice, anything then store it.... could not carry a computer around like that and ten hours of battery..

I have tried the products such as pages, numbers, photoshop etc on the Ipad. not useable for production work at all as far as I am concerned lots of good uses...

In fact I look for products where I can share data easily... I takea invoices with me (created with numbers) that I show on the Ipad to a client it must always be identical to the invoice on my main machine. (hopefully my partner have not opened the invoice and created another version?) which one do I use? how do I find the right one?

cheers elo

I agree with you - elol, Kurt, and Dennis. I don't want my MacBook or Mac Mini to be another iPad or iPhone!! It needs to be different! I going to still hope that Apple will recognize that some users just want the options.

I like GraphicConverter and will continue to support them. They work hard to make their product superior.

Yvan, you can be very helpful with iWorks issues and I have followed your suggestions several times; and, I do appreciate it all. But, sometimes things are not so black and white - sometimes there are grey areas. I know you keep saying that Apple won't change their minds about this Save As - Versions, etc. But, haven't they "changed" a lot of things over the years? Everything changes and none of us know the future! Please, just let me say this without getting on my case. I really do appreciate all the help you lend to other users. Have a great day.

Dennis Burnham wrote:

going to another OS is jumping froma frying pan into a fire, and even that is an unfair assessment of Lion. There are many, many benefits and we (now speaking for those who agree with me) just want the OS to be the best it can be.

Thats exactly how it is! Leaving OS X is definitely not an option.

I have a feeling, couple of years from now, we will laugh at ourselves for worrying so much about these changes though. Because the face of desktop and laptop systems are changing. Its pathetic that we carry around a CD drive with our MBPs now. Surely, next release of MBPs won't have this thing. I'm super excited to see what Apple does with that huge space.

SSDs can be used in a whole new way than HDDs.

If you think about it, yes MBP is going to become lot more like iPad. Its inevitable, unstoppable. So I don't really think Lion's marriage with iOS is going to be such a bad thing. Apple is doing it a bit early maybe, and without telling us why. But its pretty obvious now. Laptops are just going to be more powerful versions of iPad, utilising the full OS, but with same form of gutts.

So its sad to see this is causing enough headache for some people to want to leave OS X. I'm sure just switching some apps would do the trick, as elol explained it.

Lion OS X is quite ok in many ways, and I'll stick to it (not much choice here).

The removal of SAVE AS is not a catastrophe, but it is a hassle, even a slight headache.

Why do something awkward when it was working as smooth as pineapple for years?!

And I keep Lion OS X although the demise of SAVE AS is not the only wierd and unexpainable change in the OS,

for example in Lion, I cannot pin a simple textdocument in the Finder left column (Favorites) - only folders - weird - not a userfriendly improvement at all, which the poor guys at the Apple support cannot explain either.

Further Mission Control is slow, and unintelligent, and so on.

So Apple has a lot to do to just bring us back to the Snow Leopard user-level.

And I think the iOS is still in its early youth... (no global search for example).

Apple: Please give us the option for SAVE AS !

Hi Omar..

you can add everything almost to the side bar...

• bring up finder

• find the item whose alias you want to add to the sidebar

• go to file in top then find the item add to side bar or .... else use command T

I had the problem too and one day I was exploring all the various commands etc in lion and saw this....

to remove anything in sidebar command Delete/backspace

cheers ...

Hi sam...

for folders just drag out..

for adding applications you must use the command T

for text pdf's alias will work...but so will the command T

for jpegs just drag it out..

like wise to delete apps from sidebar just command and drag off the window..

weird all different commands no set procedure...

KOENIG Yvan wrote:

Normal, I asked Apple to check if it's really matching the rules which it doesn't.

Wait… did I get it right? You caused some people's app to be knocked off from a featured list, is that what happened?

Do you realize your experiment of checking Apple's "sticking to their rules" most likely lost that company considerable income?

Unbelievable. I'd wager you didn't have friends in school did you?

I don't know the way people are behaving in schools now.

When I was scholar then student (in the sixties), the rules were supposed to be matched.

Playing football without matching the rules is just cheating. When it's professional football, it's robbery.

Winning the « Tour de France » thanks to EPO is robbery.

Giving features wich may be disabled when they aren’t supposed to be is cheating.

No reason to leave such cheater among honest players.

As I'm not a professional developer, I don't have acces to the detailed rules so, I asked Apple if GraphicConvert was matching them. Clearly they didn't.

When I beta test, more of my reports are written to remind Apple that they defined rules so it would be fine if they take care of these ones.

Which company may loose income ?

As far as I know, GraphicConvert is always available in the MAS.

If LEMKESOFT want to be back in the list, they know what they must do : match the rules which means remove their disable scheme.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) dimanche 15 avril 2012

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 12 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.3

My Box account is : http://www.box.com/s/00qnssoyeq2xvc22ra4k

These "rules" aren't set in stone. They are an attempt to marry traditional desktop computing with the stateless approach to files in iOS—where a file never has to be saved because it always is saved.

It doesn't work. It makes no sense. It is a political decision disguised as an UX one. It's about "let's make it work as it does on mobile because we expect both to merge at some point in the future".

This is why details of Autosave and Versions implementation feel as an afterthought. I suppose it went something like this:

"What if people don't want to autosave older files they open?"

"Let's remind them about the autosave thingy and warn them by locking those files."

"OK. When does a file get locked?"

"I dunno… pick a number… two weeks should be as good as any. But give them an illusion of control, allow this to be changed to 2-3 predefined values, just make sure those settings are hidden somewhere nobody's going to look for them."

[audible chuckle by Apple employee reading this thread]

Forced Autosave/Versioning is a broken idea from the start. Versioned files get disjointed from their original files when the files are moved (via email, to a network drive, to a portable memory stick and (I understand) even to another computer via iCloud).

Versioning doesn't leave the user any control—commits, file handling, etc. As someone just wrote, it doesn't work anything like version control systems known and polished for decades. Picking a version based on a screenshot on Star Wars background just shows how badly designed that system is.

Apple's UX policy in OSX always seemed to be "make key UI decisions for the user, choose sensible defaults but leave a lever under the hood for power users to tweak them". This new "force everyone do do as we say" paradigm breaks this approach.

Forced Versioning/Autosave makes no sense in a wide range of apps, e.g. anything that deals with editing graphic, video or audio files. JPG or MP3 files, for instance, suffer degradation every time they are saved so an original image should never be saved. Suppose you open a jpg before the two weeks time-lock and change saturation on it just to see what it looks like. Bang—you just caused it to autosave, degrading file quality by re-applying lossy JPG compression. This is absurd and just shows how little thought this whole UX change was given.

Making duplicates is a very inefficient solution to that—duplicating is also a good example of what I count as an "afterthought to a political decision".

I can't imagine a code editor like Coda, BBEdit or Espresso conforming to those rules either. These apps work with local and remote files, also with versioning systems like SVN or GIT. When editing code, I know the code isn't saved until I deliberately save it. Autosave would get in the way to the point of making the app hard to work with—especially that a lot of work is done on remote files via FTP.

Text Wrangler was just updated to "Lion features" last week on the App Store. Fullscreen? Yes. Autosave? No. Save As? Of course. Plus some other saving options.

The reason you don't hear a widespread uproar about the borked new paradigm is that most people, even professionals using Macs have no idea it's there. A lot learn the hard way, losing their data, breaking files they had been using for a long time (and some of them come here to share their discontent). I had conversations recently with people using Macs for a living that went like:

Me: "You know there's no Save As since Lion?"

Them: "What are you talking about? Are you joking?"

Obviously, the apps they're using didn't lose "save as" yet. Wait until they do.

Something's in the air if even people who've made tech celebrity careers out of their loyalty to Apple like fanboy extraordinaire John Gruber begin to quietly hint that something's not right, so far in other people's words:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/03/29/autosave

Back to your righteous (or should I say, servilist) crusade. You are effectively forcing a company to break a piece of good software in order for it to conform to Apple's borked new rules "or else".

Being featured on any of AppStore's featured lists usually means noticeable increase in sales—they just lost that thanks to a self-appointed sheriff. I understand some people bought this piece of software based on a recommendation in this thread, i.e. on GC's wide array of saving options. If this gets broken, those people lose their money's worth when they update the app to the crippled but politically correct version—just like Pixelmator users did. It is a lose-lose.

As I said, something's in the air. Apple extended (as I understand) their deadline for sandboxing and using only the new saving API in AppStore apps. There are many apps not obeying the API rules on other featured lists (actually, the "enhanced for Lion apps" list is oddly short). Adobe just came up with a very good new version of Photoshop, using their own autosave (which is practical, non-invasive and which you can disable, actually what Apple's autosave should've been like all along).

The battle is not lost yet. Apple still can fix Autosave/Versioning by creating an API that is optional to use but above all, usable. Considering that some programs are unlikely to ever use the new paradigm, both paradigms will coexist on OSX for some time, creating an UI mess of historic proportions.

Dennis Burnham wrote:

As far as Mission Control and Launchpad are concerned, there is a lot to be learned about the difference between a mobile device and a desktop computer (running Lion). Let me give you a few examples:

I use the new "Magic Mouse" whose surface is made of glass and whose behavior/sensitivity resembles the iPad and iPhone and iPod touch. I can't tell you how many times my hand has inadvertently brushed across the top of my mouse as I reach for it, and suddenly my desktop screen has shifted out of range and I need to use the Mission Control icon in the Dock to bring it back if I can't "swipe" it back the same way as I "swiped" it away.

Two thoughts:

1) I find Mission Control and Launchpad to be beyond useless. Fortunately, I'm not forced to use them. I can cheerfully ignore them and go on working on my Lion Mac in exactly the same fashion I have in previous systems.

(Personally, I use a background app called Spark, which enables me to map my most frequently used applications to Function Keys. I don't know how anything could be easier than tapping one key to launch an app...and it has the added bonus of enabling me to switch between them as well — though just as often I'll use the Command-Tab sequence, while using Command-Tilde two switch between windows in an app.)

The greater point is, Apple has permitted me to choose the manner of working that is best for me.

2) My experience with the Magic Mouse was even more frustrating and damaging. On several occasions, I had the lovely experience of filling out a form on a web page open in Safari, and then with an inadvertent swipe moving to a previous page...which completely wiped out everything I had just filled in. If I reproduced here what I spoke out loud upon those occasions, this post would be nothing but asterisks.

I subsequently discovered that you can disable this behavior in Preferences, but by then I had reached the conclusion that the Magic Mouse conferred no particular benefits to me, and I ditched it in favor of a traditional two-button model with a scroll wheel that cost me all of four dollars. Among other things, I can now once again open a link in a new tab in Safari with a tap of the scroll wheel...as opposed to hoping I hit the proper region on the Magic Mouse just right.

Dennis Burnham wrote:

The only thing at issue here is this: should there be choice?

You know what I'd love to see?

We've just had two extremely literate and thoughtful posts from raftr and Dennis. I would love to see an Apple employee (or perhaps an Apple sycophant — hmm, I wonder where we could find such a person?) refute the points made in these posts.

Please...can someone, anyone, point out the errors in raftr 's and Dennis's thinking? Tell us why they're wrong and Apple is right. Do it line-by-line...quote what they say, and then post your response.

Our chief sycophant here has proven, time and time again, that he is not up to this task. The minute a challenge to his twisted way of thinking (and make no mistake, it is truly twisted) is mounted, he runs the other way and pretends that those words have never been spoken.

As I've had occasion to say once already in the past few days (with events unfolding just as I said they would): watch now as it happens again.