What happened to Save As?

It seems clear that the game is ended.

<Galaxy Quest> Never give up, never surrender! </Galaxy Quest>

Since none of are us are programming engineers for Apple, we can't say with any certainty "the game is ended". We all sure can say though that Apple is being obnoxiously stubborn.

Seriously. What could they possibly have to lose by making it an option for their apps? Lion is already set up so it is an option where vendors can decide whether or not to implement Duplicate/Versions/Autosave, or make it a choice. And yet Apple treats it as though their apps can't work any other way.

Is it really asking so much for users to be allowed to decide how they should be able to use their own computers?

You are absolutely free :

use Lion as is or use an other tool.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 6 février 2012

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 12 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.2

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

You are absolutely free : use Lion as is or use an other tool.

Well, yes. But how does that help users who have no choice? You purchase a new Mac, you must use Lion. If you then use Pages, Final Cut X Pro, or any other Apple program designed for Lion, where is your choice? Have you not noticed how many users despise the new paradigm and have no option to avoid it?

It really doesn't affect me at all (yet) since I don't use a single app written by Apple other than the OS itself. The Adobe suites, Quark and everything else I use has Save As for a workflow. What's keeping me out of Lion is two Rosetta based apps which currently cannot be replaced by anything else.

I take that back, there are two Apple apps in Lion I use. TextEdit, which you can replace with the Snow Leopard version to get Save As back; and Preview, for quick viewing of images. The only real drawback in Lion's version of Preview is that it also utilizes Autosave. Which is incredibly stupid for an app which should only be a viewer, not an editor.

Kurt Lang wrote:

You are absolutely free : use Lion as is or use an other tool.

Well, yes. But how does that help users who have no choice? You purchase a new Mac, you must use Lion. If you then use Pages, Final Cut X Pro, or any other Apple program designed for Lion, where is your choice? Have you not noticed how many users despise the new paradigm and have no option to avoid it?

I'm perfectly aware of that. It's why I wrote : use Lion as is or use an other tool.

I take that back, there are two Apple apps in Lion I use. TextEdit, which you can replace with the Snow Leopard version to get Save As back;

Not sure that you will may do that in next revision.

and Preview, for quick viewing of images. The only real drawback in Lion's version of Preview is that it also utilizes Autosave. Which is incredibly stupid for an app which should only be a viewer, not an editor.

It seems that you never entered the Preview help. For years, Preview is much more than a viewer.

It's the same for Adobe Reader or Skim.

As I wrote several times, if you want to use it as a viewer, define your files as templates. You will be able to wiew them with no problem at all.

Applying a rotation is editing the file. Happily, in this case, Preview doesn't change the datas describing the main contents, it just set a flag according to the applied rotation so there is no loss of info.

If you want to work with Lion, you must learn the way it behave exactly as you must learn the behavior of a new video recorder or the behavior of a new car.

I understand that you may dislike that but the product behave its way and you will not change it.

It's time to understand that the engineers are tossing when they design apps and that Apple engineers, they never explain their choices.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 6 février 2012

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 12 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.2

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

Please : Search for questions similar to your own before submitting them to the community

For iWork's applications dedicated to iOS, go to :

https://discussions.apple.com/community/app_store/iwork_for_ios

It's why I wrote : use Lion as is or use an other tool.

Which I replied to in "and have no option to avoid it?". Exactly what other tool would you suggest? Windows?

It's the same for Adobe Reader or Skim.

Not sure what Skim is, but the Adobe Reader can't change anything. It is a viewer only.

Applying a rotation is editing the file.

That wasn't my point. Preview suggests to pretty much anyone that it is a viewer. That it's not intended to be used for anything else. Yes, I know you can export to other file types with it, so it isn't just a viewer. But users expect it to be nothing more than a viewer, and find it frustrating when changes reappear the next time you open a document.

It's time to understand that the engineers are tossing when they design apps and that Apple engineers, they never explain their choices.

I realize English isn't your first language, but I have no idea what you mean by "tossing".

Kurt Lang wrote:

It's why I wrote : use Lion as is or use an other tool.

Which I replied to in "and have no option to avoid it?". Exactly what other tool would you suggest? Windows?

You are free to choose. On my side, the choice is done.

It's the same for Adobe Reader or Skim.

Not sure what Skim is, but the Adobe Reader can't change anything. It is a viewer only.

Skim is an alternate viewer/editor.

But for sure, Adobe Reader is just a viewer 😕

Applying a rotation is editing the file.

That wasn't my point. Preview suggests to pretty much anyone that it is a viewer. That it's not intended to be used for anything else. Yes, I know you can export to other file types with it, so it isn't just a viewer. But users expect it to be nothing more than a viewer, and find it frustrating when changes reappear the next time you open a document.

And for sure, the Finder is just designed to Find files.

It's ridiculous. An application is not necessarily designed to deliver a single feature.

The first Preview was a viewer but I carefully wrote : For years, Preview is much more than a viewer.

The fact that you didn't took care of that change nothing to the reality.

To be continued

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 6 février 2012 19:00:34

About Preview :

It's time to understand that the engineers are tossing when they design apps and that Apple engineers, they never explain their choices.

I realize English isn't your first language, but I have no idea what you mean by "tossing".

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 6 février 2012

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

I did not receive 0.7.3 until this weekend, so I did not miss what you wrote. But I did observe that you omitted the word "thousand" in between several and users.

To "Tonza" I would only like to add that the difference between marketing and technical is irrelevant to this discussion about the disappearance of Save As. It makes no difference whether Apple did this for marketing reasons or for technical reasons, the fact is they failed at both.

If there is a technical benefit to this change, then they failed to market it effectively, because I have not met anybody, including Genius Bar employees, who can give any better explanation than the implementation of "auto-save" -- -which may be a good idea, but not a valid reason to kill the SAVE AS command.

I made the comparison with New Coke to highlight how unpopular the result is with the customers. Telling me it was technical not marketing is a distinction without a difference. Besides, you can be sure that the chemists who worked on the recipe for New Coke consider themselves technical people, not marketers.

You are free to choose. On my side, the choice is done.

Umm, well goody for you, then. All of your "arguments" in various threads on this subject have been the same. Like it or lump it. As I can recall, you have never posited a helpful solution. Nor have you ever once explained why the user having a choice would be such a terrible thing.

But for sure, Adobe Reader is just a viewer 😕

Being able to tack on a few annotations doesn't make the Reader an editor. You can't change so much as one character in the document, rotate it, change fonts, or anything else.

Yes, I know that toss is the base reference to tossing an object, or "tossing an idea around". It still doesn't fit anywhere in your sentence. It's time to understand that the engineers are tossing when they design apps and that Apple engineers, they never explain their choices. What are Apple's engineers tossing? A football, their cookies (a euphemism for throwing up)? I'm just saying it doesn't make any sense. Please explain.

(1) I posted a script which clone the Save As… function. If you don't use it, it's your problem not mine.

It's really funny because on my side I have no need for it but I don't know any other guy delivering a tool able to help Save As… orphans.

I use an other one to get rid of the fact that iWork apps are so poorly coded that when AutoSave apply we can't type any character. In this case, the culprit is not AutoSave.

(2) When the engineers design an app, they don't "jouent à pile ou face" to decide if a feature must be kept or dropped. Are you understanding this way ?

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 6 février 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

Dennis Burnham wrote:

I did not receive 0.7.3 until this weekend, so I did not miss what you wrote. But I did observe that you omitted the word "thousand" in between several and users.

I already wcompared the several thousands ranting users to the millions of new mac users since Lion delivery.

If there is a technical benefit to this change, then they failed to market it effectively, because I have not met anybody, including Genius Bar employees, who can give any better explanation than the implementation of "auto-save" -- -which may be a good idea, but not a valid reason to kill the SAVE AS command.

I never trusted upon so called 'Genius Bar employees'. They are no more than vendors which proved that they were efficient.

On my side, I have nothing to sell.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 6 février 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

(1) I posted a script which clone the Save As… function. If you don't use it, it's your problem not mine.

It's not my problem at all. Your script is for users of Pages, which I don't use, and never will. I have Quark XPress and Adobe InDesign for that type of work.

By the way, users would be much more receptive to your posts if you'd dropped the ever-present attitude. All you had to say was "I posted a script which clone the Save As… function." and provided a link to it. The rest is your usual rude attitude.

(2) When the engineers design an app, they don't "jouent à pile ou face" to decide if a feature must be kept or dropped. Are you understanding this way ?

The literal tranlation (according to Google) is "play a coin". But I realize you mean to "flip a coin".

Kurt Lang wrote:

(1) I posted a script which clone the Save As… function. If you don't use it, it's your problem not mine.

It's not my problem at all. Your script is for users of Pages, which I don't use, and never will. I have Quark XPress and Adobe InDesign for that type of work.

You read wrongly.

I posted a script applying to Keynote, Numbers, Pages, Preview, TextEdit.

If my memory is right, I didn't took time to post the version which trats also iBooks Author.

As far as I know, at this time Save As… is available in Xpress and inDesign.

You dislike that but as far as I know nobody helped users bored by Save As… dropping except myself.

At this time, six apps deprieved of Save As… may retrieve it with my script.

For Final Cut Pro X I can't help.

I don't use it. I downloaded the trial version but I didn't see what may be its counterpart for Save, Save As… and Duplicate.

I guess that the late update is required to see them but I will not pay an application to try to help other users.

(2) When the engineers design an app, they don't "jouent à pile ou face" to decide if a feature must be kept or dropped. Are you understanding this way ?

The literal tranlation (according to Google) is "play a coin". But I realize you mean to "flip a coin".

I didn't used Google but Reverso which returned what I posted. Thanks for the corrected translation. I will store it somewhere.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 6 février 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

You read wrongly.

I posted a script applying to Keynote, Numbers, Pages, Preview, TextEdit.

If my memory is right, I didn't took time to post the version which trats also iBooks Author.

I was guessing a bit. I knew you had done one for Pages, but wasn't sure about the rest. A link to those scripts should be a sticky at the top of the Lion forums. I'm sure there are many users who would appreciate them. You deserve thanks for your efforts.

As far as I know, at this time Save As… is available in Xpress and inDesign.

Correct. As I mentioned earlier, the only thing keeping me out of Lion is lack of a way to run two PPC apps which I must have, and have no replacements. Otherwise, I'd be fine with Lion since all apps I use still have Save As in their menus. If Apple were to make it impossible to use Snow Leopard's version of TextEdit in Lion, then I would just make Text Wrangler my default text editor and never look at TextEdit again. Preview I would just have to remember to never touch any type of modification controls and close whatever I was looking at for reference.

It seems to me that this conversation has played itself out. I don't think anyone is going to change their minds on any of this at this point, and everything that needs to be said has pretty much been said.

Of course, you're all welcome to continue beating a dead horse if you wish...