What happened to Save As?

I'm still amazed that Apple is still so entrenched in this whole Autosave/Versions thing. An OS that gets in the way of what the USER wants to do is bad design.

Now, there are quite a few things shouldn't really be a choice. Gatekeeper in ML and other security built in to OS X to keep malware off the system is always good. It still has its limits, but it does a good job. And as it should be, you can turn it off. Case in point. Yesterday I went to install i1 Profiler in ML. It stopped me and said it was an unsigned app and wouldn't be allowed to install. That, along with a message to visit the System Profiler to make any necessary changes. I did that and changed the setting (temporarily) to allow all software. Then I could install i1 Profiler without issue. The point being that if Apple were as stuck on Gatekeeper as Autosave/Versions, I wouldn't have been able to install very expensive, very necessary software. At least for now, and maybe always, you have to have a way to disable it.

You can list a lot of grunt work the OS does without your knowledge all the time that you neither need to know about, or have any reason to change, and that's all good. But, the OS has no right at any time to force you into a specific type of workflow. It's sole function in that respect is to do what the user wants to do, not the other way around.

Much earlier in this thread, I wrote the following:

If it were that great, would there really be 226 million pages on the subject? The majority trying to find out how to turn Duplicate/Autosave/Versions off?

That was a typo on my part. It was 226 thousand, not million. However, there are now 179,000,000 matches to that search. Granted, as you get deeper into the listings, any match in such a phrase without any quotes will return any page with even only one of the words in it, which may not have the slightest thing to do with OS X. But a very large share of the earlier hits do. Within those are many more users responding on the various pages asking how to turn Autosave/Version OFF.

Shouldn't it mean something, anything at all to Apple that a very significant percentage of users hate this function and are looking for a way to kill it?

I had originaly reverted to SL from Lion (just because of save as) but when mountain Lion came out I installed it as I had read somewhere that I would be able to recuperate the “Save as”, how untrue was that report!!!

How amazingly stupid was it to change something that worked fine and that was an industry standard. I am a techy guy and quite computer literate but yesterday I was literally screaming at this machine with frustration.

I dont think the people at apple will hear you their still too busy counting the cash!

Thanks for your post. I've been tempted to buy Mountain Lion...and upgrade for such a good price! But, I read more and more posts like yours and it really scares me. Snow Leopard works very well. They've tried to make the OS like the iOS and it is not working!!

However, sometime soon they will end support for SL. Then what will we do? I hope the next OS will fix all the crazy things I hear about Lion and Mountain Lion.

SL is already unsupported. None of the new macs with the new chip set will run SL. My advice is to keep your old hardware until the next OS where this might be fixed.

I paid big money for the top Air book, i7, 500/8GB, US Keyboard, and I am looking into running SL as a guest system under Parallels. Stick that in your pike and smoke it! 🙂

I realized yesterday that inside the paradigm of Versions you can have a function that does this:

1. Duplicate the existing file at its current edit point.

2. Close the original file restoring it to the version when the file was opened (still keeping the versions that were made after the file was open).

3. Close the original file at that version, not the latest version.

4. Save the duplicated file in the same folder as the original document.

This workflow maintains the versions in the original file and uses the duplicate function. Yet it achieves an outcome exactly the same outcome as the original Save As from the last 30 years. if you open the original file it will have been restored to the version from the previous time you opened it. In other words Save As and Versions are 100% compatible. Apple didn't need to kill Save As to create Versions. The Duplicate function and the Save As function could coexist as separate workflows achieving different outcomes. Therefore the removal or manipulation of Save As is even more insane because it was not necessary to achieve their outcome. People are now manually going through the above steps when this could have been a programmed series of operations under the Save As command. No one would have been upset, no workflows from the last 30 years would have to be forgotten and Duplicate and Versions would have been a realistic option for people who want them. This makes the removal of Save As even more insulting.

Omar.KN it was on this forum called something like "How to get back Save As and remove Versions." I think, I don't remember exactly. It was at least 3 months ago, maybe more. I could not find it in my history. So maybe it has over 70k views now? Or maybe it was deleted? It was more of the same, just people trying to find a solution, or ranting at how insane the new paradigm is, and wondering what has happened to Apple.

Steve Maximus wrote:

... no workflows from the last 30 years would have to be forgotten

This is an important point. If you are 50+ and have been working 8 hours a day on a mac for the last 30 years forgetting is easier said than done. It is now many years since the folders acquired their back-forward buttons from the web browsers. Yet, ten times a day I still loose the folder I am working on. How? Well, I hit command-shift-F to perform a search and then at the end of the search I hit command-W. For the youngsters, the explanation is that command-F or command-shift-F really should open a new search window rather than converting your active folder window into a search dialog box.

How dumb is that? Incase, you actually use the silly little spotlight gizmo up top right of the screen, you have to imagine that every time you use it the OS closes your current open folder.

Forgetting is not so easy when the old way was intuitive and the new way is just dumb. It is not that I don't want to forget, believe me, I wish my fingers would perform the new commands by reflex.

OmarKN, there is NO function that does this. They COULD have done this. They chose to NOT do this. That is my point. It would have been easy to keep Save As but Apple chose to remove it even when they didn't need to. Very stupid.

Apples moto is making products that are intuitive and this new way of doing things is counter intuitive I dont even think its a question of being 50 yo, its a question of substituting something that was pefectly functional with something that, for me, has no logic...I agree intirely with your post

They did the same thing with the command for a new folder. All the way from the beginning of the Mac GUI through OS 9, it was Command+N. OS X comes out, and for some unexplained reason, it gets relegated to Command+Shift+N and Command+N instead opens a new file window of the boot drive. Why would you do that? Why couldn't the new command be Command+Shift+N and leave the one people had been using for well over a decade as Command+N?

At least that one's an easy fix. You just need to add a couple of lines to the com.apple.finder.plist file of your user account to reverse it back to "normal".

Sorry friends i have ignored the recent additions to this thread. With a few weeks of ML experience I. an report that I am slightly happier with Save As than I was before in Lion. but still in agreement with most of you. I confess I have given up relying on any thing abut Pages or Numbers to save my files and I am taking extra, albeit unnecesary, steps to insure that I don't lose my files unexpectedly.

in other words I hve gone back to working the way I did in OS-8 when I reminded myself to save things every few. inutes because I could never be sure when the bomb icon would appear to tell me the machine had crashed. Of course i know we have protected memory now so it's not the apps crashing or the computer crashing - but the net effect is the same when the stupid user interface does the same destructive shredding of something you don't want overwritten.

Kurt Lang wrote:

At least that one's an easy fix. You just need to add a couple of lines to the com.apple.finder.plist file of your user account to reverse it back to "normal".

Hi Kurt, that's welcome news. Please point me to where I can find exact details of how to do that. Is there any chance that editing this file would make command-F produce a dialog box that is preset for file name rather than content?

Well, at least in ML there is a fix (haven't tried this in Lion):

defaults write -g ApplePersistence -bool no

will get rid of all this silly versions and autosave stuff. Save as will work as expected again.

Some people say that it will make the logins take more time. For me this was true for the first time after this change. Now it works fine again (MBP 8,2).

Or, one can always start using Microsoft Office for Mac. As i did when this versions stuff come up.

HZELS

thanks will try this using my backup system when I get home on Friday....

can you confirm what the reversal process is.. ie instead of the no yes

also all of you should note that the NEOOFFICE cost for updates $10 per year gives you the option of turning Versions on or off and give you SAVE AS back.

cheers elo

Erm, just reinstalled Pages and no, there is no Save As. TextEdit has Save As.

So it's not a solution if you want to use iWork apps. There seems to be NeoOffice and MS Office who has not yet adopted the strange Apple way.