What happened to Save As?

The point is not to beat the dead horse, but to beat the drum, loud enough and clear enough so that Apple's technicians will hear that a loud chorus of concerned customers cares enough to persist.

While I understand that there is a variety of opinion, it doesn't help much for contributors to quarrel with one another. It only distracts from the desired result.

In this thread there are plenty of comments from people who are defending Apple's engineering personnel but I have not yet read one post by anybody who actually LIKES the new menu commands. What I'm saying is there is a difference betweeb accepting something as inevitable or impossible to change and making an effective argument for change.

Three days ago, the Susan Komen Foundation announced a change and if not for a widespread protest, their decision would not have been so quickly reversed. Changing the OS may take some time, but someday is still better than never.

Dennis Burnham wrote:

In this thread there are plenty of comments from people who are defending Apple's engineering personnel but I have not yet read one post by anybody who actually LIKES the new menu commands. What I'm saying is there is a difference betweeb accepting something as inevitable or impossible to change and making an effective argument for change.

You read wrongly.

I already wrote that I'm satisfied with the new menu which matches what is my worflow for years.

I repeat that when I want to create new documents from an existing one I store this one as a template (iWork documents) or as stationary (TextEdit or Preview).

I lived with Save As… but I had no need for it.

Neat and simple workflow.

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

Amen.

It's what I always said : use the tool which fit your needs the best way.

If I had need for Save As…, I woudn't use M…oSoft Office but LibreOffice but it's matter of personal choice.

Ni dieu, ni maître !

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

"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..."

To you, perhaps, because you apparently don't know the technical advantages in having a computer be proactive in saving and managing your data than the other way around.

If you've ever used an Apple Lisa, or a MessagePad, or even iWork apps on iOS, you'd already have a head start in understanding how a system implementing auto-save works. The one thing you'll notice is that you won't be relying on your remembering to save your work every 10 minutes... you know you are working on your documents, and that the changes being applied to them are significant by virtue of the fact that you are indeed making changes to them in the first place, so why shouldn't the computer save those changes?

If you don't want to make changes to a document, you either lock it or duplicate it first.

There's a more pressing agenda behind Lion's auto-saving feature than just making changes to the File menu and document versioning. Like iOS, Lion supports process management, whereby applications can be paused rather than quit, such as Lion's Resume feature. Applications have to be able to respond to messages and signals that the kernel can deliver, and the applications need to respond to those signals in a timely manner, or risk being shut down by force. That is, for the first time on the Mac, applications can be told to prepare for suspension or termination because the system decides rather than you.

In order to support this new ability to automatically manage processes, there needs to be a way for the system to save your documents without interruption. How many times have you tried to shut down your Mac, only to find it hanging on a dialogue box?! Or an app has an error and it refuses to continue unless you respond?! My personal favourite is iTunes 10, where if you have your library on an external disk and it isn't mounted, iTunes presents a dialogue box... but even if you send it a QUIT event, iTunes doesn't actually quit unless a user moves a mouse pointer over to a "Quit" button in a dialogue box that just won't go away on its own! (This is a bug that Apple has to fix, no doubt!)

For non-attended, automated use, having a dialogue box waiting for user input that never arrives is as good as an application that has crashed.

Auto-save and Resume are the two new system services in Lion that are supposed to solve this problem—one that has no need to exist in a highly parallel and scalable multi-user system. And because Lion needs to be able to manage user interfacing processes entirely on its own, auto-saving application data is paramount to making automatic process management work.

Auto-save also serves to solve the age-old, long-standing user interface "bug" of losing data should an application fail (crash). How many times have you lost work because the app you were using crashed and you didn't [get a chance to] save your work?

"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."

Well, I agree that Apple Genii at the Genius Bar aren't always that cluey... I hope my explanations are serving you here!

"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."

Because usually, technical changes are ones made under the hood, and it's not until people examine a system in its entirety that they fully understand what is going on, and why the changes are relevant.

Often, presenting a solution without its underlying problem can be confusing! And in this case, I do agree with you that Apple may have fallen short with its marketing in their attempts in making their products appear simple.

—tonza

Dennis,

I'm actually on your side about the Save As... function, but after 6 months of both sides repeating the same thing over and over, the point is either made or it's going to be ignored. Verizon, BofA, Komen, et al each lasted less than a month each.

This has degenerated into a handful of people insulting each other and repeating themselves ad nauseam. Besides, you're not not going to fix things by bemoaning this change in a forum that Apple is ignoring. Go to change.org and create a petition or something; but I can assure you that if Apple ever was reading this thread they stopped months ago when this broke down into two factions endlessly bickering.

Of course, if you'd rather stay here and fight with Koenig, be my guest; but I don't think it's getting you anywhere. Just my 2¢

So now I have files named... Backup of Backup of Backup of (original file name).pages How can this help me at all? Seriously who let this happen?

I also don't have control where I save the latest version if it is going to a new location unless I duplicate and rename then save, seriously! With Save As I could direct the files to a new location AND change the format! Safari and all the Adobe Products continue to use Save As so now we all have two fundamentally different behaviors to remember (its like driving a car with two different style street lights.. this one green means go..oh and this other one not really). This change is one of the worst features of Lion OS and unreal that it got implemented.

I agree with what you are saying that Save a Copy with the ability to rename and relocate may be worthwhile. To note thirty plus years ago (um right 1984) when the Save / Save As concept was as foreign a concept to us all as much doing anything else on a personal computer... for the first two weeks we all struggled and then clarity set in Save = no backup required, Save As= backup required, then it became engrained in the culture of using a computer. That is a way long time for any behavior to exist especially in tech world and not to expect a backlash of some sort is to be out of touch with reality.. (especially when the change is questionable at best). I have tried to be open to change and have upgraded to Lion and trying to embrace it but today when I see naming of files and the difficulty after three months of constant use.. Ugh. Apple just call it a Mulligan and send out a patch.

Perfectly ridiculous.

(1) If your file is named Backup of Backup of Backup of Backup… it's your fault

(2) You are always free to define the location when you save a duplicate.

Learn to use the tool and you will get correct behavior.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) vendredi 10 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

"So now I have files named... Backup of Backup of Backup of (original file name).pages How can this help me at all? Seriously who let this happen?"

You can tell Pages to turn off making backups in Preferences (this is something that Lion doesn't need, and serves for Snow Leopard users). Uncheck the "Back up previous version when saving" option in the General preferences for Pages.

"I also don't have control where I save the latest version if it is going to a new location unless I duplicate and rename then save, seriously!"

Documents need to be named before they can be committed to the filesystem—it happens with Save As as well as Duplicate, otherwise, automatic save cannot work. If the document you duplicated isn't saved, the system will ask for the name of the new file (and you can specify a new place on the filesystem, too).

Actually, to me, there is some stupidity on the part of Apple engineering in the implementation of Auto-save. Files that are not named should be saved somewhere anyway, and the system should alert you of anonymously-named files that need to be named the next time you log onto your computer. The Newton and Lisa did this, giving the document the default name "<application> Document, saved <date>" on the Lisa, and the document's creation time on the Newton. With Lion's current implementation, if you have unnamed documents that are open, and the system needs to force matters (ie., shut down, restart, force quit, etc.) you risk either hanging your application or losing your data.

You can bet your bottom dollar that I'm onto that case with Apple engineering!

—tonza

Hi tonza

On my size I filed a report asking them to solve the problem because at this time, the description given in Apple Web sites open the door to a class action.

I know several users, fooled by this badly wrote page, which assumed that their doc will be automatically saved.

In fact AutoSave apply correctly to documents which were saved once.

For documents which were nevere saved before, we get, in the "AutoSave Informations" folder, files which alas doen't embed the important datas : empty containers.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) samedi 11 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

To those who suggest that this thread should be abandoned because a dead horse is being beaten by a few strongly opinionated people, I confess that every time I receive an email telling me the thread has been updated by someone, I wonder whether I should ignore it or keep up the dialog. Well, here I am again.

It always feels better when others write in support of your own opinion, and I am not put off by any who challenge what I wrote with a capable, well-thought-out contrary point of view. I might even learn something in the process - which is why we are here in the first place.

GunnerBuck and Medicine Wolf are two new contributors who echo my sentiments about this change in Lion. To Tonza, I respond that I am very familiar with the use of templates and in fact make frequent use of the "Stationery Pad" option that has been an option in GetInfo since System 7 if I'm not mistaken. But that's not the point --- the letter I wrote to my landlord or bank or customer last month is neither a template nor a stationery pad item. It's just a letter than is already addressed and auto-dated with some paragraphs or graphic insertions that I want to use again, with some modifications. Save As allowed me to do that in one step. Auto-Save in Lion requires the additional step of going back to the just-opened original to close it after making the Duplicate.

But I would not be wasting my time … or yours … in this discussion if the only shortcoming was the time it takes to make an extra click. I am writing in support of the actual cost (in payroll dollars) that a business incurs when it has workgroups of dozens or hundreds of people who become confused about something as simple as a command (Save As) that they learned in their first computer lesson.

Believe me, I get the fact that Auto-Save could be a saving grace for managers whose employees have stubbornly refused to learn to save their work, and then they waste huge amounts of time and money having to start all over. I'm sure we've all had the experience of creating a complex spread sheet or writing a long text document and losing it before remembering to pause, save it with a name, and move on. But as Koenig illustrates, that accidental error isn't prevented by Lion's Auto save either if empty containers are the consequence.

There are 2 essential points in this thread, which I still hope will catch Apple's attention if the dialog remains 'on-point' is that changes like this can have significant impact on the productivity and workflow of users who operate computers as part of their job, not for recreation.

1. First, if as much time was put into the user instructions as they put into the colorful advertising of the features and benefits, users who upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion would learn the "why" rationale and the "how-to" for using it.
2. Second, there's no reason why this feature could not have been designed as a user-preference, with the File Menu reflecting the user's choice of old vs. new. They could also present a dialog every month that says "Would you like to learn about Auto-Save?" until the user makes the switch and direct you to a Support document or video or both. And there is certainly enough room in the File Menu to leave Save As in place forever, living comfortably alongside the new Duplicate command for occasions when Auto Save is not necessary, such as for changes that occur before the 5-minute period has elapsed.

Please don't lecture me about my ignorance of operating systems or why I don't want the documents to be auto-saved. In my graphic design work, for example, there are very good reasons why I don't want things saved until I am ready to commit those changes, and thank goodness Adobe has not (yet) denied me that privilege. In my database work (FileMaker) I have lived comfortably for 26 years with the knowledge that records are ALWAYS auto-saved when committed. And therein lies a distinction between work/documents that are creative and should remain in RAM, and data records that should never be vulnerable to a user's whim. By considering iWork documents to be one-and-the same, Apple has not considered that word processing and layout design work in Pages is not the same as experimation with numerical results in Numbers. With Keynote, I confess, I could go either way.

I have gone through the few applications that I have that support Auto-save on Lion, and have noticed in 10.7.3 that performing a SIGKILL on processes that have untitled documents are able to save their contents to the Autosave Information directory, and recover them when the applications are next opened. So I'm pleased that this is indeed the case!

The same goes for quitting applications with unsaved documents open via the Quit command... applications are able to save untitled documents, and recover them when the applications are resumed.

So what I said here:

"With Lion's current implementation, if you have unnamed documents that are open, and the system needs to force matters (ie., shut down, restart, force quit, etc.) you risk either hanging your application or losing your data."

is not worthy of consideration and can be ignored, unless an application is not written properly and doesn't exhibit the behaviour described as planned.

The apps I have used to test with are:

• Textedit

• OmniGraffle Pro

• OmniOutliner Pro

• Pages

• Numbers

and they all are reliable when it comes to recovering documents after a fatal circumstance. So far, so good!

Unfortunately, I don't have any other applications to play with apart from those that come with Lion, but I am confident that auto-save is doing what I would expect it to do under adverse conditions.

—tonza

At this time, I'm aware of three other apps that use AutoSave :

iBooks Author

Keynote

Preview

It seems that Final Cut Pro X does the same but I can't check : I don't own it and there is no such feature in the trial version.

The empty file which I displayed in my screenshot was created under 10.7.3 😟

I can't say if it's a general behavior because I get some surprising behavior with the system used in French.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) samedi 11 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

I seriously don't believe that a change in semantic regarding Save As... and Export... versus Duplicate and Export... is costing anyone any serious amount of cash just because of the way people have been introduced to a user interface some 20 years ago.

The differences between preparing and deferring a document are so benign that there is no reason for people to be confused at this slight change in semantics. I for one welcome the new capabilities in Lion regarding auto-save and resume, because time and time again I feel that with many other facets of computer technology so advanced today, that it is ludicrous to expect that we have to continually micromanage our machines to do the sorts of things that our machines should be able to do themselves around the real work we have to do. Taking out the more costly possibility of data loss due to human falacy (ie., you forget to save a document) is much more useful and in my opinion, much more important than the costs of changing a user interface convention to the benefit of having computers do more work for you and expose less opportunity for mishaps.

Of course, you are entitled to your opinion. But if you have concerns regarding the costs of training and productivity in relation to subtle changes in a computer's operation, then I have a plan for you—let people who want work on the older system (Snow Leopard) do so, while introduce Lion to people who wouldn't mind the change. That way, the staff you have can progress as Apple's technologies evolve and ultimately leave those pretty bad 20-year-old habits behind.

I'll end this discussion here, because I have tried to discuss the reasons behind the changes, the benefits they would bring, and the fact that Lion's new features are actually not new in the world of computer science, and that these new features are ones that I have been waiting a very long time for Apple to re-introduce because of the benefits they bring. I sincerely do hope that you can consider my comments without blatant dismissal.

The more reliable that our computers are, and the less micromanagement we have to apply to get our computers to work, the more real-world work we can get done. And surely that is a good thing, isn't it?

—tonza