What happened to Save As?

So... what is the difference between "Save As..." and "Duplicate"?

To the user, it's one menu command. And they both do the same job, essentially (disregarding the details I mentioned earlier).

What's the difference between organising files between Lion and Snow Leopard?

None.

So, what is making the lack of "Save As..." so impractical?

—tonza

While "Duplicate" can be used to achieve a "Save As . . .", it is not simply one menu command.

The user must:

"Duplicate"

"Save" to give the new copy a file.

"Revert" the original file to get rid of autosaved changes since the last save.

"Close" the original file.

Since it is possible to do this, it should have been possible for the programmers to retain the "Save As . . ." menu item to do it.

Some users want access to and control of their file systems (and, whether or not there is access, flash storage uses a file system just like hard drives and floppy disks). People have been clamoring for an autosave function for years, and Apple seems to have come up with some good ideas for what that should include, but that is no reason to abandon what worked well in the old system.

The difference between Duplicate and Save As (for tonza) is this:

When you Save As, your document remains in front of you as the only document open. When you Duplicate, you get two documents, one which must be given a new name (same as with Save As) and the other which you have to dismiss.

This is not the biggest pain-in-the-*** thrust upon us by software developers - we've all seen worse -- but think about it this way:

If in 1984 they had given us this Duplicate menu option and we had been using it for the past 27 years ... and then now someone invented SAVE AS ... we would all be hailing it as a great time saver and wondering why nobody thought of it until now !

Barry: good point. Tonza is probably just another user, though she speaks as if she is invested in defending the issue. My bad.

Jeff and Dennis: thank-you for noticing that there is at least one extra step forced upon us under the guise of "improvements".

Tonza: I frequently open a document in Pages, make a change or two and then want to save it out as a different, accessible document without either creating a template (because I may not ever want to use that particular document to do it again), or changing the original, which is automatically now changed... unless I "duplicate" it first, close the other one, then make my chang and save it (4 steps - which have to be repeated if I want to do this a couple of times). Whereas, I used to be able to open the document, make the changes and "save as" not changing the original (or going through several steps to create a template I will never use hereafter), yet being able to continue several times in order of a) make changes, b) save as/repeat until I have several documents the way I want, in the folder I want... not hidden in my machine as various states to be searched through in the cumbersome "time machine" UI (which I loath and avoid at all costs).

Original steps: 3; following steps: 2

Vs.

"Improved" steps: 4; following steps: 3. Now, do the math...

If I have to do this several times with several different doccuments, the steps involved add up.

This reminds me of the new method for loading brushes in Photoshop CS5... arg. Why did they do that? But that is another forum...

"Some users want access to and control of their file systems (and, whether or not there is access, flash storage uses a file system just like hard drives and floppy disks)."

For now, this may be true because a replacement device driver has not been developed yet on Mac OS X, but there has been lots of discussion (Ars Technica has talked about this in depth) that using a filesystem on flash storage is:

a) a waste of space, and

b) unnecessary for a completely instantaneous and randomly accessible device

so the use of HFS+ as a filesystem on flash storage may probably disappear in due course (but this is purely my speculation).

I wouldn't be surprised if the HFS+ filesystem gets another major architectural change just to stop wasting storage space like it does now (a plausible reason why SSD sizes greater than 256 GB has not been offered by Apple at this time).

As for the rest of this discussion, it's all due to habit. You do not have to mimick the "Save As..." command in Lion down to every little detail. You could, for example, make duplicates early to avoid having to rummage through prior versions, and not close documents unless you absolutely have to (quitting an app, for example, closes and saves the documents for you).

You can experiment with being lazier at your leisure... I'll leave you alone to do that.

—tonza

Tonza,

I was never really talking about file systems so much as a hierarchy of folders where I can locate my work in an easy and humanly readable fashion.

I get that habit has a lot to do with it... which is in fact part of what I am talking about - Apple, without so much as a by your leave, has made my habits difficult and more time consuming. To top it off, the new habit they want me to adapt, doesn't work well for my particular scenario.

And people like you simply don't get it.

So, it is time for me to admit that you are incapable of grasping what I am saying no matter how I word it.

Now you're getting personal.

I do get it (and I don't know what group of people you think I belong to... and frankly, don't care). I have been able to analyse your difficulties that are really not that difficult to solve or understand, and explain concepts that you haven't even been aware of beyond what you see on the screen, and you think I don't get it?!

You're on your own, now.

—tonza

There is a difference between being aware of the "behind the screen" file systems, and caring about it. This discussion was never about that. What it was about is the "Save As" command. My control of my ability to save a file the way I want to has been taken away from me and you can't help that no matter how much jargon, engineering insight and technical specs you try to throw at me or anyone else in the forum here... and it just makes you sound like you are making excuses for Apple.

I don't know, nor care "what group" you "belong to" but you keep replying to me in a way that says I should be happy with the change, if only I understood the reasoning behind it.

The point is: I simply don't care why they did it.

I have my suspicions and I don't think it has anything to do with the file systems; programing a UI "button" behavior does not depend on that... this was a choice and I think it was erroneous.

As with others in this forum, we don't like it and we want our "Save As" button back.

And, yes I have put in several "problem reports" and given feedback through the correct channels.

Sorry I bothered you.

Seems like noone has mentioned another important issue with the lack of "Save As..." I need to open text files created on the Mac on a Windows machine and the Windows application required a DOS Text file. In previous versions of Text Edit you could "Save As..." and rename the file and change it to another text file format and that has always worked. Now neither "Save a version", nor "Duplicate" allows you to specify a different format, you can't even rename the file except for the forced default "...copy" name. This is a big oversight and needs to be fixed.

Fortunately WordPad allowed me to rename and reformat the file but that should not be necessary to use a Windows product to do something Mac TextEdit used to do so elegantly.

Dennis_Burnham wrote:

The removal of SAVE AS is different. It's a classic "ain't broke don't fix it" example. On a system known for its intuitiveness, Save a Version is as counterintuitive as can be. You execute the command and you're still on the same document, so what is the "version" and how does it differ from "Save" ? The Duplicate command has worked splendidly in Photoshop, where there is a reason to have two identical docs open together.

There's actually a precedent for this, and your example helps show the distinctions, whether you know it or not. There's been a long-standing problem (in all 1980s-metaphor software, not just Apple's) where if you are on a document and want to save a version of it without leaving the document, you can only do a Save As. The reason this is a problem is that users would do their Save As, do the (necessarily manual) renaming of the document, and get back to work. The problem? They'd forget they were still working in, and now updating, the renamed document that was supposed to be the filed-away backup version! Their changes were no longer going into the "real" document. This would result in a time-wasting round of closing the doc, renaming or switching them around, and then opening the one you were supposed to stay in if Save As hadn't derailed you.

That is an example of how Save As has been counterintuitive since it was invented, but we accept it as "good".....because it, and its workarounds, are the tradition we're used to.

Some developers solved this by adding "Save a copy". What this does is when you name and save a document, it branches off from the one you're working on, in a more useful way. Once you are done with your manual rename and your save, you end up in the same document you were were working in before, which is what you often want, avoiding the mistake above.

So, Save As is for when you want to end up in the new doc afterward, and Save a Copy is for when you want to end up in the old doc afterward. Both have their place. My point is that many (not all) people believe they want Save As back, when what they really want is Save a Copy. Photoshop does have a Duplicate command, but I do not like it as much because it adds another manual step of having to then choose Save As to still put that version on disk. Adobe knows it's not the same thing, because Photoshop has all three: Save As, Save a Copy, Duplicate. Photoshop simply provides the most flexibility...and the most confusion for newbies, which is what Apple is probably concerned about.

I see what Apple is trying to do. They are trying to rethink document handling as they have so many other things, successfully, and to address the original flaw in Save As for versioning. But the new Save behavior is not really successful. And I don't think Save As is what most people actually want to bring back. I would guess if people want an easy way to branch off a document, Apple should provide it with Save a Copy, or Apple should fix Duplicate so that it works properly.

terryc23 wrote:

Seems like noone has mentioned another important issue with the lack of "Save As..." I need to open text files created on the Mac on a Windows machine and the Windows application required a DOS Text file. In previous versions of Text Edit you could "Save As..." and rename the file and change it to another text file format and that has always worked. Now neither "Save a version", nor "Duplicate" allows you to specify a different format, you can't even rename the file except for the forced default "...copy" name.

Developers have an eye on tech support costs, and one source of tech support calls is that people Save As to the same name but different and less capable format, like rich text to plain text. This causes them to lose formatting permanently, which naturally upsets them, then they call support. This has caused developers to force the "...copy" on the filename. (Photoshop is an earlier pre-Lion example, if you try to save a rich layered file to a flat file it will append "...copy" to the name.) Which itself annoys people frequently.

Again, I see what Apple is trying to do, but their solution is flawed. There needs to be a way to easily switch formats. Some developers prefer to keep this action away from the Save dialog by routing all format changes through Export. Meaning not all developers would agree that Save As is the correct way to address this scenario.

The point of my last couple posts is that Save As is not the perfect command many here say it is, and that if you're going to try to change Apple's recent decisions, this is an opportunity to get it right, which might mean neither Apple's way nor Save As, if you think it through.

Yes, I figured out that you need to Save the copy to change the name and or format. An extra unnecessary step if they had left Save As... as we all have been using it for so long, in Windows and Mac.

>>The reason this is a problem is that users would do their Save As, do the (necessarily manual) renaming of the document, and get back to work. The problem? They'd forget they were still working in, and now updating, the renamed document that was supposed to be the filed-away backup version! Their changes were no longer going into the "real" document.<<

My experience has been the converse: Filemaker has Save a Copy... since the save is automatic, but I have a number of times wanted to be working in the new Copy only to realize that my changes are in the original version and that it was not acting as Save As...

Still don't think I want Save Version or Save a Copy for text documents, etc. I really, really do want Save As... back. They can add Save Version and Save a Copy if they want, why get rid of something that has been working just fine?

terryc23 wrote:

They can add Save Version and Save a Copy if they want, why get rid of something that has been working just fine?

They don't believe it's working just fine anymore. In an effort to simplify the computer by decreasing reliance on 20th-century-vintage file systems (which in part I agree with), they see it as a shift as similar to when the first Mac was designed to force people to use the mouse and deprecate thje keyboard. People said the same thing then: Why are you taking away our ability to use our fast command-line interface? What is this clumsy mouse thing? Apple wanted to make sure people couldn't go back, so that they would have to learn how the new system worked. People hated the early Mac for that.

Again, I am not saying Lion save is a good thing right now. It is not a good thing. I'm just explaining that Apple's attitude is not new, and is, in fact, historically part of being a Mac user. We have to hold tight...and protest...and let Apple know how we want it done...until Apple gets it right. Like when they relented on their early OS X decision to not allow you to store icons on the desktop, and 100 other examples.

You are kinda right about how we need to adapt to change. I admire the way some software producers, Adobe for example, allow the user to make their own keyboard shortcuts or design their own workspace. They even sometimes offer the option to continue using the previous version's menus.

And there is a very important. reason why this makes sense and I think is overlooked by Apple's engineers when they do things like remove SAVE AS. It's this: not everyone worships at the altar of OS-X where they revel in each and every cool new tool and study the long-term impact of learning to do things in the newer, better, way. Some of us actually use our computers to earn a living, and we are willing to do an OS upgrade and maybe postpone for a week or a month the afternoon or evening when we can explore the new tools, learn how they work, and adapt our workflows to take advantage of them.

My computer is my assistant, whom I have trained to work at my command. When Apple removes SAVE AS the way they did, it's as if they took my secretary aside and broke her left wrist, handicapping her. Or they went out into my tool room and threw away all the drill bits and socket wrenches, making it harder for my mechanic to do routine machine maintenance.

Apple needs to remember that some of us need these tools to earn a living, not play. Imagine if you went into an Apple Store and put the electric outlets in the genius bar on 240V and left them a note that says: we did this to improve the way you work. You'll get used to it.