I use pages for my work invoices and have a pretty comprehensive filing for previous invoices. The omission of 'save as' in the lion version of pages is extremely frustrating. Is there a work around? Will they fix this in the future or should I switch to a microsoft excel worksheet?
Pages-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.7)
This change is perfectly coherent.
It's you which used the word idiotic to define the choice made by Apple.
They are perfectly free to make the changes which they want as well as you are perfectly free to drop their products.
Alas for you, every third product will be updated to take benefit of Lion new features.
Some will do that the way used by xCode, others will do that the way used by TextEdit, Keynote, Numbers, Pages…
The logic behind the changes were explained several times but you just prove that you are unable to understand such simple things.
I guess that you are ready to switch to Mer.oSoft products !
Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) jeudi 1 septembre 2011 15:43:20
iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.0
My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>
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I didn't want to quarrel with Koenig, but I am glad to see someone else feels the same way I do. I had a support rep on the phone the other day and he agreed with me that Save A Version is confusing. I noticed today that the keyboard shortcut for Save a Version is the same as the old Save command, so if you routinely save while typing from time to time, you are saving a version, whatever that means. I also noticed today that when I went to Revert to a my previously saved file when I wanted to discard my work, what appeared was a Time Machine sort of interface that was limited to just the document I was working on, so I guess that is what the auto-save is doing.
Regarding Lion, I could make other complaints about the first generation of Launchpad and the way your work is now slowed down if you need to use the arrow keys on your keyboard where you used to be able to click at the top or bottom of the scroll bars. I find the behavior of the swiping on my Magic Mouse to be annoying. My desk surface doesn't have enough friction for me to use the page-up/page-down gestures, it just makes the mouse slide around on the desk. So i either have to put some abrasive or rubber cement on my desk or go back to having a mousepad under the optical Magic Mouse. Sorry if these Lion comments are off-topic. It just makes me wonder what environment or what kind of users were doing all the beta testing for Lion.
Indeed, I agree - both that this is off-topic and that there are other issues...
I actually use a trackball (Kensington Pro), which does have a large footprint, but has made both the mouse and keyboard (except for the obvious) almost obsolete. It has saved me from carpal tunnel and increased my productivity.
Compared to the whole gestures thing - well, I just don't know. I never use a pad on my laptop; I plug in my trackball, and I don't have a phone that uses any gestures, nor an iPad... all of which makes gestures sound reasonable, if difficult to learn. I have watched my wife get used to her new Droid and it has been a challenge. I have no use for a phone that requires more than a single button push to make a call, myself. If I want to surf or research, I don't really want to do it on a phone... but I do understand the convenience. We have certainly have taken advantage of it - but one in the house is fine. I really don't need my production computer to behave like a pad or a phone, though.
For me, I have ordered SL disks. I think Lion is too much of a change. Mine came on a new iMac and it is not working out too well for my Graphics Production. But that's just me... I am sure this will be a great OS for the newest young adult generation who cannot even imagine life without their internet connected phones.
It's simple,
beta tester tested the operating system and discovered iWork 9.1 when it was delivered to the rest of us
As Apple user since the Apple ][ and shareholder since 1996 ($24 each)
As the guy which built two versions of the French GSOS (it was dropped by Apple France)
As the guy which built the French AppleWorks GS (and Claris allowed me to sell it)
I think that I may give my advice if I want.
Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mercredi 28 septembre 2011 23:28:50
iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.0
My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>
Please : Search for questions similar to your own before submitting them to the community
Yvan,
People are here to voice their concern about the change of a feature. Regardless if you mean it or not, your advice comes off as smug and condecending. We're not super users or early shareholders like yourself so we turn to these forums for friendly advice and some kind professional opinions. I may not have a great deal of knowledge in computer programming but I do posses an MBA and have a successful small business. That being said, what I've learned both is theory and practice is that customer service is key. When someone posts in a forum like this we hope for friendly customer service and advice (kind of like how an Apple Store is run) and not to be challenged after every post by someone like yourself. If you are indeed affiliated with Apple and it's development then I suggest taking a softer approach in trying to understand people's frustrations with certain products.
Thank you, Gunner for those kind words of wisdom. I admit that I wrote a rather harsh message about the subject that opened this discussion and I was not surprised to have someone rebuke me for not sharing his point of view. The world is full of opinionated people and I count myself among them, but I draw the line at being nasty just for the sake of expressing myself in public.
Back to the point though, I see that my answer was marked as the "correct" one, but it really isn't the answer at all. Mine is still a question: what's the meaning of Save a Version? What's the logic behind making a duplicate and saving that under a new name, leaving two open document windows? If there is a different way these new menu commands should be used, I am willing to learn it.
Incidentally, I have observed that Text Edit is also changed in Lion, and with those changes comes another bug: I used to be able to paste clipboard images from my screen capture program, SnapZPro (Ambrosia) but that no longer works. I can paste other clipboard images into Text Edit, but not from SnapZPro. And the same SnapZPro image that can't be pasted into TextEdit from SnapzPro can still be pasted into other program documents.
Go figure.
The removal of the Save As command is a stupid move and I hope someone deep in the bowels of Apple will get the message. Unfortunately, this is just one of many changes that make Apple software harder to use. I really wish I could get through to someone at Apple. They're dismantling all that was wonderful about Mac software AND hardware. It seems that someone from Microsoft has infiltrated Apple and is determined to make the Mac OS and other Apple software just as awkward, bloated and difficult to use as Microsoft products.
Yes, you have described it several times.
Yes, we have said several times that is is stupid and we don't like it.
Yes, you keep insisting it is a great thing because you worked on it and you are a stock holder.
Grovey for you. We remain dissatisfied and hate the change, as do many others out there who have not found this thread. I now have multiple steps to perform what used to be a single "Save As" just so I can have different versions I can find without the itiotic "Time Machine" like search for a revert that I don't want to revert to, just open and do something with. Same with the stupid "This doccument is locked because you haven't worked on it in some time, are you sure you want to save these changes" dialoge. Well, duh. If I didn't want to save the changes, I wouldn't have clicked command-s, now would I?
You people are NOT LISTENING to your customers.
You are instead, defending a change that is indefensible to us. You may as well be trying to convert us to a different religion.
Desktops are not hand-helds and the physics of use are different. The application of use is different. These differences make moving the OS to reflect hand-held devices a bonehead move that reeks of corporate push for sales, ignoring actual customer base, relations and usage. This OS direction is likely gain you the younger hand-held market in the begining, but they will not see a need for desktops in the long run (that marked sees no need to actually own printers even), so they will not stay will it. In the mean time, Apple will lose their existing customer base due to arrogance and pride because they will not listen to those who actually WORK in this desktop environment.
My wife works at Penn State as a professor. She teaches in communications at the Capital Campus. She says they will not be upgrading to Lion because of these changes. If Apple loses the educational industry over this, the reprocussions will be severe in the long haul.
Apple better be paying attention.
mitchbentley wrote:
Yes, you have described it several times.
Yes, we have said several times that is is stupid and we don't like it.
Yes, you keep insisting it is a great thing because you worked on it and you are a stock holder.
May you point a message in which I wrote that I am a stock holder ?
As far as I know, I wrote that share holders were satisfied by Apple policy which isn't what you say.
You people are NOT LISTENING to your customers.
You are instead, defending a change that is indefensible to us. You may as well be trying to convert us to a different religion.
Will you understand one day that here you are speaking to end users like you ?
If you want to tell something to Apple representaives, use the dedicated channel.
Thank you for speaking to a near 68 years old beeing as if I was a 'younger' 😁
I already wrote several times that I own no iPod, no iPhone, no iPad and that I have no plan to buy some of them.
As an atheist, I have no plan to convert you to another religion.
I just feel free to write here my own advice as you wrote yours !
Look at statistics, Apple sell more and more macintosh machines since Lion delivery 😁
But for sure, you are more knowledgeable than Apple team about operating system and applications design.
Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) jeudi 8 décembre 2011 16:02:46
iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 12 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.2
My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>
Please : Search for questions similar to your own before submitting them to the community
It is really simple for me. I posted the original msg in here because the feature does not make my life easier. It has made it quite harder. I use 'save as' to save under the same file format but with different names. For me, I title the invoices I send my clients by the date they were issued. It is a remarkably efficient way of keeping electronic files when you save by the title of the invoicee and the date. But now I cannot do this without jumping through hoops. And my template for each client has to start from scratch.
I'm sure everyone's situation in needing the feature is unique in here, but for me Yvan, you can argue your point to the moon and back and it still wouldn't make the work of filekeeping for my small business as easy as it was when I still had 'save as'.
I'm glad this thread has created such discussion as I had only intended it to solve my problem but instead something better has happened. Discussion. Keep it going and mabye one day I'll have an answer to my question that doesn't include several steps, but rather one simple step a la the days of the 'save as' feature.
I'm quite sure that the documents which you create for each client have a common basis.
Save a document made upon this basis as a template : azerty.template (not azerty.pages).
When you will double click this file, you will get a new document which was never saved so you will be able to work upon it exactly as you did in the past with the single difference that there will be no risk to accidentally save the work in progress upon the original file.
It's what templates are designed to deliver.
Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) jeudi 8 décembre 2011 16:36:40
iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 12 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.2
My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>
Please : Search for questions similar to your own before submitting them to the community
I did not know the historical track, so thank you for that.
Unfortunately, even with the reasoning behind it, it is still more cumbersome and therefore more work, than the older system.
Allow me to point out, point-by-point:
• documents are now atomic objects that carry associations regardless of where they exist on your system: on disk, on the network, in memory or on flash storage,
Except that now there is a hidden file system to maintain that and I no longer have control of it, despite the fact that is is taking up space on my hard drive. It is also harder to utilize a previous version because it requires a Revert.
• to save a document under a new name, you need to make a copy of the document first and then change the new copy's name—this is handled by the "Duplicate" command in the "File" menu of Lion applications.
We got that. We don't like it. It takes 2 extra steps, which is less efficient for the user.
• versions of a document are not duplicates of it. All versions of a document are essentially the one and the same document, except that they track the changes to the document as they appear in different points in time.
But you miss the point: we WANT duplicates. This defeats what the user wants.
• Lion's document management system is intended to support the concept of auto-saving where a document can be changed both in memory and in storage regardless of where in the system it lives.
But not all software behaves that way, which puts the user in a precarious position when saving and duplicating documents (we now have to consider the behavior of each particular program we are working in... "Do I need to save this before closing it?" becomes a constant new concern). It also takes the storage management out of the hands of the user, which again, we don't like nor want. Many of us have systems in place for dealing with large amounts of files. This defeates and destroys our perfectly usable and efficient systems. At the very least, we should be given a choice as to wether or not we want the program to take over this kind of management.
I for one, was not given a choice. I bought a new iMac 27" i7 and it came with Lion. I tried to install and boot from Snow Leopard, using the recommended partition method, from Apple. My machine actually has a newer RAM architecture and will not boot from Snow Leopard, ergo: no choice.
Had I known all this, or had I the luxury of my other machine still working, I would have returned the new iMac and bought a used Tower from Mac of All Trades instead.
As I said before: Apple is not listening, they are instead, apolgizing and trying to make us want it. I have had to spend a great deal of time defeating several of the new "features" because they interfere with my workflow, habits and processes. All f the new "features" could have been made choices, but most are not. It took a lot of work arounds, but I finally got my machine to stop opening programs and last windows - that I had closed before re-starting - from opening up, because the check boxes that are supposed to be a choice, don't always work. Re-booting isn't clean anymore; so again, there are now additional steps for each action that used to be a single click. That is but one small example.
Please get the point of this thread: we don't like the new method; we want the choice to disable it. This is not a step forward when it demands more effort... and for the way we work, it does demand more effort.
The point of discussion was the absence of the "Save As..." command. I gave you the technical design reasons why. I don't think I can elaborate further than this.
Lion is offering a way for users not to care about how things get stored, and instead, offers procedures, mechanisms and techniques to manage what gets stored (when). Users shouldn't have to know about file systems because in the future, file systems may no longer be present (since the concept of disks will probably become obsolete thanks to the growing popularity and use of flash storage). What matters more is that the operating system an allow you to automatically safeguard your data and give you easy access to it on demand. How things are stored may change in future, so the idea here is to make file systems irrelevant.
Lion offers these document management services as APIs for apps to use, an are actually quite robust—the design of object-oriented storage is not new, and the computer science behind it has been developed over the last 20 years. But how these apps ultimately work depend on its developers. If there is something that your app is doing poorly, you can send feedback to the developers of the apps.
—tonza
What a great and informative discussion. Now I understand how bad decisions are made. It's all very logical, but, as Mitch says, that doesn't make it practical. I, too, believe that the bottom line is ease of use, and this change doesn't make the software easier to use. It also takes away a degree of control, as Mitch says. And in all this, it smacks of that same perverse logic that gave the world Windows and other MS products, which are so confoundingly convoluted with bells and whistles and little traps that may seem nifty to engineers but just make life harder for users. keep it simple, elegant and clean, like Apple is supposed to be.
Thank you Dusner.
You at least, "got it." Obviously Tonza doesn't.
Ultimately, how elegantly and logically engineered it is, is irrelevant if it is difficult or cumbersome to utilize. This is true of any design; I can create a stunning website, have flawless reasoning behind each aspect and show you how the CSS, JavaScript and jQuery loads fast and works perfectly, but is nonetheless cumbersome, difficult to understand and fails to be user friendly or function the way people expect it to. Such a website may sell the client for a time, but in the long run it will fail if people give up due to unmet expectations and move on to something easier to actually utilize.
Metaphors aside, one would think just listening instead of defending, would be a helpful skill for developers of any product line. But, hey, if Apple doesn't want to listen, we can't force them. Next time I'm ready to spend money on a machine, I will likely vote with my dollars in a different way... oops, another metaphor.
I've said my piece, I think I'm done here.
What happened to Save As?
