What happened to Save As?

I know it's not the answer, but have you tried Bean for your text editor/word processor. It does a lot more than Text Edit and almost as much as Pages. It has lots of Services that you can enable that are quite useful. I associated all text docs to open with it, and I haven't used Text Edit for a long time (I got tired of the silly way it handles margins - Bean does a great job of margins!).

I'm still using SL (and hoping for Apple to wake up before upgrading!), so I don't know if Save As is still on the menu. Anyone tested? Or how it behaves with Versions.

Maybe it would work for you Steve, as a Text Edit replacement.

Linda,

Thanks for the advice. Bean says "Bean has some limitations: it doesn't do footnotes or use stylesheets and is only partially compatible with Word's file formats. Also, it allows in-line graphics, but not floating graphics."

I need footntes, full word compatabilty and floating graphichs. I am a power user of Pages and Text Edit is not something I use. I also looked at LibreOffice, NeoOffice and OpenOffice. None of these do what I need. Also I have many thousands of Pages documents, and some old word documents, so I don't need another format of word processing document on my system.

In the end, I paid for iWorks, it worked perfectly, and now it doesn't unless I don't upgrade. The alternatives are not better, they are inferior. The alternatives to Preview are also difficult to use or not as powerful as Preview. Apple had the right mix of features and simplicity for me, and Save-As and no Version. Therefore I am now unfortuantely waiting for Mountain Lion to return to the sanity of Snow Leopard or I will look at Windows 8.

Thanks again for trying.

Steve.

You're absolutely correct, Steve. I use Bean as a Text Edit alternative and it's great for that - quick little jobs, like printing from the internet. I still use Pages, because I also use stylesheets and floating graphics. I really love Pages. I used to use MS Office when I had a windows machine (years ago!) and people have asked me why I don't just use it on my Mac. Because I don't like it and never did, especially not like I like Pages and Numbers. I also tried LibreOffice, NeoOffice and OpenOffice - did not like them at all. They don't feel "polished" to me. I am interested in Calligra Suite; I am keeping my eye on it for the data base aspect. It claims to be more of a full data base like MS Access, not like the data bases of OpenOffice, etc. (Oh, I do wish Apple would get back a data base like AppleWorks had, not this Bento!! - but that's a different subject/thread!!)

But, I just don't want to work with this "broken" iWorks as you say (in Lion). So I stick with SL, even though I was highly interested in Lion.

This is great advice Steve - and for those unfamiliar with Software Update's options, you can also specify that your want to "ignore" the iWork update so it doesn't keep expecting you to check the box.

Steve Maximus wrote:

Steve Jobs knew that you listened to your customers and gave them what they wanted, and tell your staff to provide it, no matter what seemed possible. This new guy has the whole approach the wrong way around.

Not only did he listen to customers and give them what they wanted, he also had the ability to think like a customer and imagine what they did not even realize they wanted. That is the real genius: instead of developing something that requires people to learn to think like programmers, he insisted that programmers learn to think like people.

Want an example? Visual voice-mail. Until Jobs turned the cellphone industry upside down by changing the way we review voice mail messages, you had to listen to your messages sequentially, even if you had already heard them already. Not only isn't it necessary to do that anymore, it actually is difficult for some people to remember how it used to be and for those who never did it the old way, their reaction is: how stupid and priimitive.

I think it is a safe bet that if Jobs had lived long enough to experience for himself the new Versions/Duplicate/Auto-Save, he would have been responsive to the kind of complaints we see in this thread. As a believer in how the computer should do the 'heavy lifting" for average people so that they don't have to remember to save or even think about saving, he woud not have discarded the new Lion feature, but he would have allowed customers to have a choice that does not disrupt their workflow.

Denis,

I am writing an ebook on all of this, plus some articles on a finance blog about the long term value of Apple. Can I use your comments here? I think you have said it so beautifully, "Instead of developing something that requires people to learn to think like programmers, he insisted that programmers learn to think like people."

Steve.

Yes, Steve, you are welcome to use my comments. When I first learned about SPJ many years ago, I read that his special talent was his charismatic ability to inspire developers. This is a theme that runs throughout Walter Isaacson's excellent biography.

I used to be a meeting leader for a Mac user group in northern california, during the years when Jobs was in exile. Most of the audience consisted of seniors, average people who struggled to make their Macs behave without crashing. In those days, I became expert at managing the system extensions and control panels, plus all the other special precautions we had to take with limited memory and hard drive space compared to what we have today. I remember asking for a show of hands once, to indicate how many in the audience had ever been beta testers for Apple - then I held up a CD-ROM of the "new" Mac OS 8.5 and told them that for $99 they could be beta testers for Apple. It was such a buggy release.

Then I would ask people in the audience if they had ever used the Finder's Put Away command, which I had seen Jobs demonsrate somewhere, back in the days of System 6 or 7. The concept was brilliant: drag all your stuff out to your desktop and then when you were done for the day or whatever, you could Select All and execute the Put Away command and every single item would go back where it came from. It always astounded me how few people knew that the Put Away command even existed, and when they saw it demonstrated, they gasped at the thought of how much time they wasted without using it.

Here we are 20 years later and our ultra-modern Unix-based operating system can't do that task. Jobs had the ability to envision, the way Buckminster Fuller did, how to add up all the wasted time every day in the world consumed by people moving stuff around on their computer desktops, trying to stuff things back into folders. So when it came to iTunes and other programs that work with a specific file type, he made it unncessary to concern yourself with a filing system.

In the iOS, things work that way. Users find it a little confusing with the PDF's that they want to add to their iBooks interface, for example, but you can see how iBooks worked like iTunes in terms of document management and how they had to revise it when customers wanted to have their PDF's on a bookshelf, too.

Unfortunately, when you create documents in Pages, Keynote, Numbers, Text Edit and other programs, Apple can't as safely predict where you want to store them, and how you want them to be organized. Maybe you want folders for your clients, or folders for your projects, or whatever. And that's a segway into the discussion about how the desktop computer is unlike a mobile device, which is the heart of this discussion.

Linda,

I suggest you stick with Snow Leopard. Like I stuck to Windows 98 through the Windows XP fiasco, or how many people stuck to Windows XP through the Windows Vista fiasco.

I had to upgrade due to MobileMe and iBook Author. They don't work on SL (Yes you can get iCloud to work on SL but not that well and not with full functionality).

I like the new iCal as it fixed a lot of issues with SL iCal. That is about it, the rest is not worth it

Mail is annoying as it saves drafts to the server without asking you, and if you are preparing an email with 5MB of images it sends that to the server, slowing your internet connection. Then when you send your email it is still trying to send the draft so your email takes longer to send. Then it keeps the draft on the server because it cannot work out that you have sent the email during the draft saving. So you end up with big emails on your drafts folder in icloud which you have to go and delete manually. The solution is to save drafts on the local drive, which means you don't have drafts on your iCloud server. I use an iPod Touch, iPad and MacBook for email so I want my drafts to be synced across all devices. Now I don't have that functionality.

Preview will save a version of your JPEG images which is at about 80% resolution so it lowers the quality without you being able to control that. Then it will do another save of a version at 80% of the latest version so 80% of 80% or 64% quality of the original. The longer you have a JPEG open and doing edits and versions makes saves the lower quality the image becomes. There is nothing you can do about it other than work at a BMP or maybe a PGN although I have not tested this.

I also had to upgrade to 4GB Ram from 2GB and nothing runs faster. Everything takes longer. Even closing an image in Preview takes about 2 seconds while it things, presumably Versions doing something. Shut down is fast but start up is longer. Overall really a waste of $29. Plus they don't tell you this but iPhoto is now a separate program and you have to pay about another $15 for that. So the real cost is about $45. I have spent maybe 5 days full time sorting out how to get it to work. What is that worth? About another $3,000. Where is the value now? Plus every time I open an image I am afraid that Preview will destroy it. It's all just not worth it.

Steve.

Thank you Steve for such great information. I have wondered about Mail, because Apple touted the latest and greatest, it was luring me to Lion for the Mail update! LOL!

I use AOL, would Mail behave the same using AOL (saving drafts, etc?)? I don't use iCloud, and don't have iPads or iPhone. I use POP mail instead of imap (I just don't like imap).

I have heard the Preview horror stories and I use JPEGs a lot, so I wouldn't want Preview AutoSaving them!

Oy! This is such a mess. I hope Apple hears us. I have sent Feedback(s).

Denis,

Thank you for this information. I was thinking today about the mistake that Apple has made here. I think they look at the uptake of the iPad and think that people want that type of operating system. They don't realize that people want the physical interface, not the operating system. I want my iPad to have the functionality of my laptop not the other way around.

I was in bed the other day, using my iPad to talk to my wife who is away on business. She wanted a file sent to her. I had to get up, go to the computer, open the file, convert it from Pages to a PDF, and send it to her, then go back to bed. If I could have done that from my iPad in bed I would have been happy.

I hate that iPhoto and iTunes try to hide the files from me. I have to dig them out if I want to do something else with them other than what those programs can do. Often I have to export an image from iPhoto to the desktop, open it with Preview and make some changes them imbed those into a Pages document. I need to have a file system to do this. I can't do this on my iPad. I can do everything but the Preview style editing. Therefore they have not understood that the iPad has to come to the laptop, not the other way around.

Your comments on Steve Jobs wanting to save us time is great. Every keystroke, every move to a mouse, it all adds up. Plus if you have to think about every move then it takes your mental attention away from your work. Also every moment waiting for a stupid animation to happen is annoying. I used to be able to open my camera on my iPod Touch and it was ready. Now I open it and it takes about 3 or 4 seconds to think before it opens. I think this is the locations services working out where I am to embed that into the photo. I have missed some great photos waiting for this BS. Steve Jobs would not have wanted this, you are so right about that. Thank you.

Steve.

Linda,

In the first week of using Lion I sent about 13 feedbacks on separate issues related to Lion. It is a joke.

I think for you Lion Mail would be OK, but nothing better than Snow Leopard Mail, so not worth the upgrade.

My wife and I sync mail, contacts and calendars across devices. We did it with MobileMe and it worked fine. We had to upgrade to Lion to use iCloud. It is no better than MobileMe. In fact the Calendar and Address Book come with these crazy skins that try to make them look like "real" paper and leather. I don't use paper in my real life. I have no pen in the house. I am in the digital age. I don't want my programs to look like they are from 20 years ago. I found a way to reskin them to look normal, but again, this is a work around. It is all really nuts now.

Steve.

A note for everyone on Snow Leopard's versions of Preview and TextEdit in Lion.

I just discovered if you run Repair Permissions in Lion, it destroys the SL versions of these apps. Simply by changing their permissions back to where Lion thinks they should be, neither will launch. They'll also get trashed if a Lion update does anything to them.

So always keep backed up Snow Leopard versions of Preview and TextEdit on hand on another drive so you can replace the ones on your main Lion drive when needed.

Well, I switch on and upgraded an old Linux computer. I was planning to buy Aperture, but now I am trying the Lightroom 4 trial. Finally, after iOS5 I got a Galaxy S2.

Things may change and I might still buy Apple stuff, but not with Lion and its junk.

Even doing this my SL Preview now crashes. I don't know why. I've reinstalled the SL Preview files 5 times and it does not work. I think Apple have actually consciously tried to stop people using SL Perview on Lion. It just totally *****.

Hmm, I'm not having any problem at all with SL's Preview or TextEdit in Lion. I've been testing both pretty heavily the past few days and both work fine (the Repair Permissions issue notwithstanding).