Q: What happened to Save As?

I don't agree that the auto save is for text and not images.  Keynote is auto-saving.  My Pages documents are auto-saving.  Preview files are auto-saving.  Even my TextEdit files with images inserted are autosaving.

The way Adobe documents behave and the way Adobe chooses to give its users the SAVE AS option is not so much a reflection of the document content as it is Adobe's realization of the way people work.

This is a critical point in the understanding - and misunderstanding - of this issue.

One might say that working in Adobe's creative suite is more of a "creative process" than working in Apple's iWork suite of applications, but I think Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller would have quickly denied that whenever they did their wonderful demos showing the creativity users can apply to their iWork documents.

In the creative process, we don't necessarily want to save our work until we are ready to do so.  Because of the size of certain images, doing so in a program like Photoshop with a large file open can result in a huge waste of storage space.  If Apple was thinking clearly, they could have come to the same realization about Keynote and Pages files that contain media, even if Numbers files are strictly alpha-numeric.

Photoshop users are familiar with a command called Duplicate, in which a new window opens with an identical array of pixels, allowing users to edit and design as they wish, and committing the new window's contents to a file stored on disk only when the user desires to do so.

So, if Adobe now realizes that its users might like to benefit from Apple's new technique of auto-saving they have enabled the feature in a way that allows the user to decide.  If I am working with a 200mb photograph, I should be the one to decide whether I want numerous auto-saved versions on my hard drive -- or worse yet, on my expensive solid state drive, or do I only want to have saved editions of the ones that I really care about being able to compare.  Otherwise, if you have dozens of versions in your timeline and you want to revert to a particular one, how can you differentiate them?  Adobe files with layers and channels and delicate color adjustments are not as easy to differentiate as an iWork file which has only 1 layer and and alsmost always containts text that very easily differentiates each auto-saved edition.

You've hit on a very important point there - how to differentiate between the different versions in your timeline. That's the main problem I found when experimenting with the new Pixelmator.

Hi:

have not read any of your comments...

Converting my two very simple iwork documents were concerned   1 numbers    and one Pages  to doc and CSV 

not an option.    does not work as far as I am concerned...

cheers    elo

Looks like you are correct, raftr. It appears Adobe ignored Lion's Autosave/Versions function entirely. Here's the preference panel for CS 6:

I had a 70 MB file open for about 20 minutes and just kept randomly making changes to it, using the above settings. I expected at some point for the file's desktop icon to change every 5 minutes to reflect what I had on screen. It didn't. No matter how long I worked on the image, or what I did to it, your file is not directly saved until you choose to. Closing the unsaved work results in the standard message you expect, Don't Save, Cancel, Save.

So what it looks like what Adobe did was implement its own way to restore a saved state it manages if the app crashes.

markinbali wrote:

 

You've hit on a very important point there - how to differentiate between the different versions in your timeline. That's the main problem I found when experimenting with the new Pixelmator.

This is one of many points I have been making since the start of this thread.  It is especially pertinent when working with files that are graphical, not text.   I don't know Pixelmator, but I do know Photoshop and Illustrator and I would certainly not upgrade to the next edition of Creative Suite if it began auto-saving my files for me.  

It's one thing to have Time Machine making backups every hour of files that are new or changed, but Auto-Save doesn't save things based on changes, it just saves based on the document being open for a period of time.  Unless I am mistaken, you can have a Pages document open and idle and it would still be doing version auto-saves.  I don't need that kind of wasted space, and it would only complicate my being able to select the one I want to revert to.

Kurt Lang wrote:

 

So what it looks like what Adobe did was implement its own way to restore a saved state it manages if the app crashes.

It was clear all along though, they'd never be interested in going the AppStore route to sell the Creative Suite.

At the same time, Pixelmator will always do anything Apple asks because this is what gets an app featured.

Dennis Burnham wrote:

 

It's one thing to have Time Machine making backups every hour of files that are new or changed, but Auto-Save doesn't save things based on changes, it just saves based on the document being open for a period of time.  Unless I am mistaken, you can have a Pages document open and idle and it would still be doing version auto-saves.  I don't need that kind of wasted space, and it would only complicate my being able to select the one I want to revert to.

Wrong.

It appears that I really wasted my time when I tried to explain the features behaviour.

(1) AutoSave apply only if something is changed and save the entire document.

(2) Versions is designed to save only what is changed.

So, no change means nothing saved.

What is annoying is that even if we change one character, given the badly designed code of iWork applications, it's the entire index.xml which will be saved.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mercredi 11 avril 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

It was clear all along though, they'd never be interested in going the AppStore route to sell the Creative Suite.

And I deeply praise them for doing so. They maintain control over how their apps work that way. The only Adobe products in the App Store are the two low end beginner apps; Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. Both pretty darn good apps for the money.

Thanks for the correction, but ..

Wrong.   It appears that I really wasted my time when I tried to explain the features behaviour. (1) AutoSave apply only if something is changed and save the entire document. (2) Versions is designed to save only what is changed.

 

I find this confusing.  If Versions is designed to save only what is changed, are you saying that it saves the new content to the same copy of the previously saved file, and if so, which "edition" is the one that gets re-saved.  At what point does it begin making new, additional editions of the same document.  And how exactly do you define Auto Save to be different than Versions.  I thought that in Lion they are synonymous.

Given that I am not a neophyte about this, and considering that I still apparently have more to learn, I am even more convinced that the impact on workgroups is substantial because most people don't look under the hood.  They just use their computer and go o with their life.

Dennis Burnham wrote:

 

If Versions is designed to save only what is changed, are you saying that it saves the new content to the same copy of the previously saved file, and if so, which "edition" is the one that gets re-saved.

Yes I think it uses the same file, all versions are saved in that one file. If you take it to another computer you will have all the versions that way, it makes sense that way. Ultimately a file with one word type in it could use megabytes of space if you had a lot of text in it previously and changed it around a lot. May want to do an experiment on it.

I thought all versions were saved only on the local computer? If you copy the file to another computer, or removable device, that copy has all versions stripped.

Kurt Lang wrote:

 

I thought all versions were saved only on the local computer? If you copy the file to another computer, or removable device, that copy has all versions stripped.

Well then that s-ucks even harder.

I described quite ten times the different features with screenshots.

AutoSave save the document on itself.

Open azerty.pages

change one character.

AutoSave will apply and save the modified document in the file azerty.pages.

Versions apply in two cases :

(1) when you trigger the menu item « Save a Version »

(2) every hours if you don't trigger it thru the menu item AND if something was changed since the late version recording.

(3) when we close a modified document (I write this one from memory and this old one may fail ).

The datas stored by Save a Version are not stored in the file itself.

When you trigger the local menu in the document's title bar, you ask the app to reconstruct the different versions of the document starting from the datas stored in the dedicated .DocumentRevisions-V100 folder.

Given the code of iWork apps, this mean that the app decipher the different index.xml stored as versions and insert the multimedia objects which may be embedded but which are stored only once in the .DocumentRevisions-V100 folder.

I repeat, no change = no new version created.

CAUTION : when you print a document, the app store datas related to this task in the file so this one is a modified one. I didn't checked that but I assume that it will generate a new version.

I remember a document speaking of the ability to take care of this case and don't store a version for a document whose unique modification was a print task. Alas, I don't remember if it was the description of an existing feature of the description of a wished one. I think that filtering this case would be fine but at this time I don't know what is resally applying. I'm interested by many other things than AutoSave or Versions.

I apologize but if you want more details, look at the thread :

« Versions as a recovery tool »

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3303794

I'm a bit tired to repeat what I described here several times and what was commented here by :

« don't bother us with your description of the features, We know what they are and what they do. »

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mercredi 11 avril 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

PS

In the screenshot the folder in deep blue is the document itself (remember that an iWork '09 document is just a packed folder ) and that it's visible.

The other one is in light blue because it's normally an hidden folder.

Hi:

read the other discussion issues see yvan's link to other thread) and will repeat my comments from there..

It is sad that something that what used to be so simple now needs an wanabee technocrat to explain to all of us how to to live with a system that we have become used to for the past twenty years.  And!!!  even the wannabe seems to get confused and forget how the new world works....

something has gone terribly wrong with the world of apple.  It is almost as if we are back in the dark ages of the late eighties and early nineties.

apple used to be intuitive and simple to use.....

come on tim.       lets get back to basics.....

I apologize for my comments about a wanabee   I hope he and you all see how sad it is that we have to find out how to use a simple ?????? tool for the masses on this thread.

cheers