What happened to Save As?

Kurt Lang wrote:

... I thought, "You have got to be kidding! You want me to use a remote server to store my personal data? I can't think of a bigger security breach waiting to happen."

Sophisticated users such as those posting here would almost certainly encrypt their sensitive data, given that it is a trivial excercise. I use dropbox and do not feel at all exposed. The vast majority of users, however, will be mincemeat for a hacker. For example, my good friend who posted her name, address and date of birth on a public Facebook page and had fraudulent activity on her credit cards within 24 hours!

A person in my firm was fired and she gave her iPad back, forgetting to remove the iCloud account.

Until I discovered it, other people were able to read the messaged she received from her significant other through Messages. Embarassing...

If I did not remove her account, today people would still read her personal messages...

I agree that the loss of "Save As" is really irritating. I've been trying to get used to it for weeks and I still don't have a good sense for it. All alternatives seem to add more steps than simply "Save As." Which had the added appeal of doing precisely what it said and usually precisely what I wanted. Using applications that have not "revved" to the new menus are a pleasure in comparison.

I was also frustrated to discover, accidentally of course, that Preview will now save the changes you make without notice! This is probably even worse.

Oxcart, iCloud does not encrypt my address book or my emails or my calendar. Hence I have gone off iCloud. I read about how WEP Internet security took one year for people to work out how to crack. Even 16 digit passwords are being hacked. I have 3 different layers of encryption on my data. But once I put a message on Facebook or add an calendar entry or send an email, that part of my life is not encrypted. Plus someone used a person's iCloud to wipe their computer. Encrypted or not the data was lost. Now a good backup will stop that. I have 7. Two at home in different places. One with my wife, two with me, and two with friends in other countries. But I have take this next step to stop someone having the ability to contact everyone I know through my address book, know where I will be tomorrow at 4 pm and have the power to delete my laptop. And I certainly have steps to take to ensure that my backups can never be in someone else's bands who might find a way to hack into them. Steve.

jgable.

Firstly welcome to the forum. We tend to vent our frustrations here, not just at Save-As but also the whole new way that Apple is treating its operating system and its customers. You are welcome to vent here. There are a lot of good people here who offer great advice on solving real problems, so please ask questions and they will help. Generally I just complain about Apple so I'm not much help myself.

We all feel your pain. A few days ago I wanted to do a simple resize on an image while keeping the original image at its full size. I opened up the image in Lion Preview. I made the changes and went to do a Save-As. Then I realized I can't do that. I had to revert the image, close it, duplicate it on the desktop, open the duplicate, resize it and save it, then go to the desktop, rename it, then move it to the folder where the other image was. I wanted to smash my computer into the wall.

Right now I am in the process of rolling iOS6 back to iOS5. I hope I can do that.

Another example of how Apple tries to control my files and decide what I want and don't want for me. I recently took myself off iCloud. That included the photo sync process. I was always annoyed at iPhoto, especially having to pay for it in Lion because you HAVE to have it to use the iCloud photo backup. This is when it used to be free. I also hated how it made my images an internal thing and I couldn't easily access my images. I decided to get off iPhoto also. I exported my 9,000 images into a folder, then deleted them off iPhoto and iCloud. When I looked at the iPhoto Library it was still 452MB. I had emptied the trash so there should have been no images there. Yet iPhoto was still hanging into some of my images with me asking it to delete them all. I had to rename the folder and start iPhoto to create a new Library which didn't have the old images in it. Talk about a computer having a mind of its own. When "Delete" does not mean delete.

Another classic Apple-controls-my-files situation, I disconnected the iCloud Documents sync when I got off iCloud. That allows Numbers and Pages files to be synced between my devices. It said that I had the option to turn it off, but all the files on my computer that were synced would be deleted. They would remain on the Cloud. In other words the Cloud was the ONLY place I could choose to have those files, not on my computer. I had to go to the cloud, copy the data off those files into email, send the emails to me, then delete the files off the Cloud. The calendar said that it would delete my local calendar if I stopped syncing and just keep it on the cloud. I did a manual backup of my calendar to get around that. At least Address Book let me keep a local copy. Nice. Someone in the Address Book team got that the local device is an OPTION for where to keep files.

Steve

How do I get off this thread?

MichaelLAX, Go to the top right corner of the page and see the button "Stop Email Notifications." Press it.

I used iPhoto for a while, then tried the Aperture trial.

Finally I gave a try to Adobe Lightroom and it is GREAT! A little more complex, of course, but very powerful and FAST.

I'd suggest you give it a try (if you haven't yet).

Stefano67,

Thanks. I've seen Lightroom. It is way to serious for my needs. iPhoto for Lion became way to serious for my needs. I tried to email some photos and it gave me all these options to send the photos as crazy post cards etc. I don't need all that extra functionality. Email with photos in it, nothing else please.

I just want to keep photos in folders as I want them, be able to email them quickly, duplicate them when I want to and edit them simply if I need to. Plus back them up as files, not as an iPhoto Library.

Did you know that iPhoto keeps two copies of every photo you have? One which you edit and one you do not. So if you rotate a photo that is sideways, you have an original and a copy on your hard drive. Insanity.

I will stick to an old tried and tested system. I call it... Files. I will keep the files on my computer and manage them as I choose.

I do not want to find that every photo is doubled so the size of my backup is doubled. With 12 GB of photos that fits nicely onto a 16GB flash drive. If they were in iPhoto that would be 24 GB of photos and I would need to have a 32GB flash drive as a backup. Plus every time I opened iPhotos it would jerk violently, trying to manage all the events and photos in its interface. So I actually had a lower quality way of viewing my photos.

Files, a file system, a Finder program, and Preview (pre Lion) were more than enough for me. And will be again. Plus I am not limited to Apple. I can use them on a PC, or even a Linux system.

Files worked for 25 years, they are still the backbone of the operating system. Please don't hide that from me Apple, and take control of that from me. I am perfectly capable of managing them myself.

Steve.

Yes, Aperture too duplicates photos.

LR is different: if you adjust th ephoto (rotation, levels, colors etc) it applies the changes to the original file "on the fly" when you open the photo. It only duplicates it if you edit it outside of LR (e.g. in Photoshop).

Steve - great video - **** of a lot of screws!

I also thought the problem was just a loose connection. I had a friend look at it and when he opened it up he confirmed what the apple shop said - it needs a new screen - Rp5,000,000 - half the price of a new 13" MBP. So now they use it with an external monitor. It does seem strange that the screen works if you twist it and hold it with one hand - can't be much wrong with it can there! You would be welcome to have a look at it.

My daughter needs her own laptop instead of sharing with the kids so that's why I'm giving her my black macbook when the new battery arrives. Plus the fact that I don't have to feel guilty about buying a new retina! haha.

There seems to be a bit of a scramble to buy older MBPs at the moment but I suspect that the reason is more to do with people not being able to get their heads around living without hard drives and CD drives. To me its a no brainer! No moving parts means more speed and no mechanical problems. If I were you I would stick with your plan - 11" Air and a big thunderbolt screen. The advantages of the incredibly fast thunderbolt ports, solid state memory and more portability outweight the autosave and save as issues.

Its actually now only the autosave issue, which after all is just a software problem and most of the software I use in ML does not have autosave.

Mark,

I can have a look if you want. I will probably drop by the office in the next few days.

I am going to wait for the 13 inch MBP Retina. The MBPr 15 inch my wife will get will be enough for now.

The Air 11 inch with 8GB takes 2 months to be delivered here in Bali. I also find that the 13 inch is a better sizi of I have to use it on the road. Plus the MBPr is a powerful machine so it will be years before it is "slow". The Air is less powerful.

Steve.

Thanks stefano. I am happy with jpeg files in folders and SL Preview.

I can't get iOS6 to revert to iOS5 but we still have one iPod and one iPad safe with iOS5.

I am guessing that Apple will start making software updates compulsory. You will turn on your computer and find that it already turned itself on in the night and downloaded and installed the latest update, put all your images in iPhoto and all your music in iTunes, all your contacts on the iCloud, with all your files, without your permission.

stefano67 wrote:

Yes, Aperture too duplicates photos.

There is a simple solution to the problems with iPhoto: drag and drop your old copy of iPhoto6 into mountain lion. Boot holding the option key and create a new library. Unfortunately, if you have opened your library in a later version of iPhoto you will have to reimport or dig out an old backup if you have one. Thankfully I have never let newer versions touch the library.

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Here is another annoying thing: I get an email with the latest reply to this thread, I find I want to comment, so I click to go to the discussion, I then click sign in, I sign in and it dumps me on the main discussions page, so I have to navigate back to where I started. How dumb is that?

The book, Shopcraft as Soulcraft, which I mentioned previously may provide an explanation. Apparantly the uncertainty of a career in management encourages the top guys to distance themselves as much as possible from ALL details of the operation. Their language is as vague as possible so that later, when things go wrong or right, they can claim the interpretation of their words that is most creditable to them. This means that important decisions are made by low level people, who are dispensible. Steve Jobs was the linchpin at Apple because he was like the benevolent dictator and not beholding to anyone. I just realized that the future is a depressing prospect without him.

Steve,

I am sorry to hear of your separate disasters trying to get things done. I've held off from iCloud because my Internet connection is not real fast and I didn't want a lot of unexpected sync-ing to slow me down. I think I'll continue to avoid it until the daily usage issues calm down. Likewise I have always avoided iPhoto, initially because the folder system was so obtuse. I have never had a good photo directory substitute though as I made do with the Kodak program for years (which was simple at least). I tried Aperature which has some advantages, and I'm now trying to use the Adobe Organizer which I like but is slow.

For these file issues I was very pleased to find the technique for restoring Save As using Keyboard Shortcuts and learning how to suspend the auto-save feature. I feel like my points of frustration are calming down now and I completely credit these bulletins.

Jim