Q: What happened to Save As?

Sigh. I used to open up a document, make a bunch of changes, and "Save As" a new version. For this type of workflow, because of Autosave and Versions, restoring the "Save As" command is meaningless.

Try this out in TextEdit.

1. Create a new TextEdit document and type the word "Original". Save the document and call it DocumentA

2. Close it and reopen it. Change the word "Original" to "Modified". Save As ... DocumentB. Close it.

3. Reopen both documents. The word "Original" is gone. That is because A was autosaved/versioned while you were working on it. So unless you do a "Save As" before you ever start making changes (which is not what you used to have to do) you will have to revert DocumentA to get your "Oiginal" back.

Essentially you still have to do a "Duplicate and Revert" to preserve the "Original". The new command has given us back nothing.

Thanks ericsiegel01.  You gave a very good, clear, simple, example of what it does.  And, that is NOT good!

Have you tried/tested what RonL posted?  Here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4157637?tstart=0

Would it help?

ericsiegel01 wrote:

 

Essentially you still have to do a "Duplicate and Revert" to preserve the "Original". The new command has given us back nothing.

Ouch. I'm afraid you're right.

I had tried something like this when Lion first came out and it performed as described but I don't use the affected apps enough or create enough permanent files with them to have experienced the alleged permissions issues others describe. In any case the setting was undone by the Mountain Lion upgrade and I have not reapplied it.

If a lot of apps start to take "advantage" of autosave/versions I will explore again.

The other thing I like about this is after reassigning the keyboard shortcuts if you go to General (in the System Preferences) and make sure "Ask to keep changes when closing documents" is checked... you get back the standard save dialog box with the "Don't Save" button... rather than "Revert"

True but if you "Save As" it will be as if you had replied "Save" to that dialog box since your original document is closed behind-the-scenes when you "Save As"

@RonL,

Does this behavior happen when you use your global disable "autosave/versions" Terminal Command AND the SaveAs Menu workaround?  Or, with just one of them?  (Of course, with the "Ask to Keep changes...." checked)

...Starting to feel like Apple has really mucked this one up!

For those who have tried the Terminal command, it's is very important that you restart after entering it. The change is not read or acted on by the OS until you restart and it reads the contents of the hidden .GlobalPreferences.plist in your user account. Once you restart, then things change. Here's the difference between Preview and TextEdit with the option on (default) and off.

Preview's menu appears like this by default:

After entering the Terminal command and restarting, it becomes this:

Duplicate disappears from the menu, but so does Save As. So you lose that ability with Preview. You can only Save. If you have the option in the System Preferences on to ask if you want to save changes when closing a document, then default button to cancel is "Revert to Saved". After the command, it becomes the older style "Don't Save". So the main loss with Preview is there is no Save As at all. Not even Duplicate.

TextEdit's menu appears like this by default:

After the Terminal command, it becomes this:

Duplicate goes away and is replace by Save As with the long standard Command+Shift+S keystroke. And it works just as you would expect. You can make all of the modifications you want to a text document and do a Save As. The new document has all of the changes, and the original closes unaltered.

As already mentioned, the Save As that apple magically invented for Mountain Lion, is actually not the good old Save As, as we know it. Instead we get something uttely useless, that defeats its own purpose by NOT reverting changes in the original document.

<Edited By Host>

Apple 1976-2011 wrote:

 

As already mentioned, the Save As that apple magically invented for Moutain Lion, is actually not the good old Save As, as we know it. Instead we get something uttely useless, that defeats its own purpose by NOT reverting changes in the original document. They could probably be sued for false advertising here.

 

Technically, it is "Save and Duplicate", absolutely pointless and possibly dangerous.

BTW, I just posted a tutorial on how to succesfully disable Auto Save, Versions and bring back Save As in Mountain Lion:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4166543?tstart=0

It includes a workaround for the error messages that made TextEdit useless after disabling the Lion crap.

 

<Edited By Host>

Thanks for censoring my post, AAPL!

Apple is dead. All hail AAPL.

And, like I mentioned in my censored post, AAPL ought to be sued for false advertising regarding the so-called Save As "feature" in ML.

<Edited by Host>

Kurt,

In Preview can you remap the Save-As command to Ctr-Shift-S through the keyboard shortcuts to get it back, or is it lost forever? I'm still on Lion so I can't do this myself. I use Save-As in Preview a lot for my work. It is critical for me.

Steve.

Apple 1976-2011,

Please don't underestimate the wisdom of your words. I study human behavior in business and what is happening at Apple will most probably be a business university text book case study in 20 years time. They have lost the values of Steve Jobs and they should be expectd to decline again to bankruptcy just as they did the last time he left. It will take 10 years if it happens, unless someone else can take control. Maybe in 9 years from now when they are worth almost nothing then a champion will come and save them again. As for now, every new decision they make is the opposite choice that Steve Jobs would have made. It takes time for these bad decisions to add up, plus there is no new integrated package for people to choose. When there is Apple we die the slow death that they deserve.

Steve.

Apple 1976-2011,

The email I got alerting me to the updates to this discussion included your original post without the censoring. I would like to refer to this comment in an upcoming ebook. Is that OK with you?

Steve