Q: What happened to Save As?

There are two reasons for this. One is that people try to emulate Steve Jobs without understanding what he really stood for. They think he wanted less features. That was never the case. He wanted a simplified user experience not simple products. Secondly some people, usually managers, need to stamp their authority on a situation. They can only do this by changing things from what they are to something else. Steve Jobs didn't need to do this. If something worked he left it the same. That choice is not available to the new Apple management that try to justify their salaries. Thus they change things that work perfectly for no obvious reason. The vacuum left by Steve Jobs will only get bigger.

 

 

No search by file name or command-shift-f? You've got to be kidding. Why on earth did they remove that??

 

I can't in my wildest dreams imagine why. I

It is worse than you think.  In OS9.2 and all preceding systems command-F gave you a find by file name search.  In 10.0 to 10.3 it was absent and you had to use the mouse and a drop down menu to get find by name, just as you do currently in Lion and ML.  Find by file name returned in 10.4 under the command-shift-F command.  Even then it was not implemented properly and there was no cursor in the dialog box to let you know you had successfully issued the command.  In 10.5 the cursor came back.  Things went well all through 10.6 and now the idiots have broken their interface again.

At the risk of repeating myself... the developers don't use their own products.

I just realized I am contributing to the Numbers forum, sorry.  This thread should be moved to the ML forum.  But to return to the topic:

"Save as..." OVERWRITES THE ORIGINAL FILE!!!!!!!!!

Uuugggghh!

BTW, I did the OSX feedback thing and included a link to this 'discussion.'  I would urge everybody who reads this to do the same.  We did manage to get find-by-file-name back the last time they got rid of it, so there is hope for save as and versions.

Steve Maximus wrote:

 

...some people, usually managers, need to stamp their authority on a situation. They can only do this by changing things from what they are to something else.

I've felt this to be the case with OS X for some time. To me, the OS matured some time back, and now the designers seem to be in a cycle of either adding new features to correct problems that don't exist or removing needed elements just for the sake of creating a new version.

I'm glad to be seeing some agreement on these issues.

I mean really...I want to find a Mac user anywhere who says:

"Whew, I'm really glad I have to scroll through a list of 300 irrelevent files in order to find the one with the key word in its file name that I wanted to find. Thanks, Apple!"

"Whew, I'm really glad I don't have any idea of when all of my new email has arrived now. Thanks, Apple!"

"Whew, I'm really glad I have to go through six steps with Duplicate instead of two steps with Save As in order to accomplish the same thing. Thank goodness those bad old days are behind us!"

Is this what the designers are imagining Mac users worldwide are saying, now that they've worked their magic?

Yes, all these things seem to be part of a distressing trend. For me, it began back in Leopard (I believe?) with the seemingly arbitrary taking away of hierarchical dock folder navigation to replace it with "Stacks".  Since then, we've had any number of things in subsequent versions that just don't make sense, and the trend seems to be accelerating.

The core difference between Windows and the Mac OS has always been Apple's intuitive, intelligent, well thought-out design that anticipates the needs of the user rather than fighting the user or getting in his way. This difference seems to be vanishing…

Interesting article on the subject of this thread....

http://macperformanceguide.com/MountainLion-SaveAs-data-destruction.html

cheers elo

Having looked at the Microsoft Surface website it is amazingly clean and simple and intuitive. Maybe Microsoft have woken up to what made Apple great and maybe they will make a fight back. If Microsoft become intuitive and Apple become arrogant and complicated then they will go back to bankruptcy as they did the last time Steve Jobs left. I am looking for an alternative now. I am waiting for Windows 8 and the Surface. I am holding back on buying a new laptop becuse I want to see what Microsoft does. When I became an Apple user almost 5 years ago I never imagined this day happening. A single philosophical change in the leadership of a company affects everything that it does. Sadly I believe that Apple has changed in a way that I will not choose in the future. I see a company with products nobody wants to buy in expensive Apple stores all over the world. That is a recipe for bankruptcy. These things take time maybe 5 years from now if the current trend continues. People will write university case studies about Apple and how one small problem multiplied into many small problems until people turned to something else. It is just a question of when that something else becomes clear. Maybe Android through Google? Maybe Microsoft 8? Maybe Ray Ozzie is secretly building something? Only time will tell. In sailing when the sail flutters slightly this is an indication that it may be time to tack. The smallest hints can indicate the beginning of the biggest changes. Apple will either fix this problem or this will be remembered as the beginning of the end. It really depends on whether the management care enough about the company that they didn't start in their garage. It may be a good time to buy Apple products while they are not completely screwed up. Just a thought. 

I haven't seen Surface yet (and I must say I am not much interested in it). I gave a try to Win8 but it ***** (IMHO).

I bought a Samsung Galaxy to replace my wife's iPhones and it has nothing less than the iPhone. The only thumb down is the battery life (I have to charge it daily).

I do not plan to buy a computer shortly, but in case I find that Apple is still better than Windows, although Linux is getting closer to Apple... and Linux is already well established at my place.

I would suggest you try Android in addition to Surface.

As a protest I propose to put a sticker over the apple logo on both of my laptops.  I happened to notice the characters did this on the Big Bang Theory sitcom.

In any case, the Apple logo is kind of boastful, and makes most people think 'tosser'.  It is also a weak spot.  I dropped my phone from 6 inches and the corner hit the Apple logo and cracked the screen behind.  I don't like paying for froth, either in the hardware or the OS.

Stefano67, thanks for the feedback. My point is that I will look at the Surface. 12 months ago if Microsoft offered a free tablet and laptop I would not have even looked at it. I was just happy with Apple. My time is more valuable than the cost of the hardware and Apple saved me time when Microsoft cost me time. Now I have to spend time on Lion work arounds to solve Apple created workflow issues. That takes my time. So now I am looking elsewhere. Even if Apple is currently better I fear for the future. Apple did great work winning new customers. It can lose them just as easily. As soon as there is a better alternative I will move. 12 months ago I would not have looked at another operating system. Linux? Android? Windows 8? The point is that a captive client has become a dissatisfied client. This forum has over 23 thousand views. I was on another that had 67 thousand views. This is not a small percentage of the users. This is a big number of people looking for an answer. As soon as there is an answer people will change. Apple cannot afford that.

Kurt, LiveQuartz works well. Not 100% like Preview and some things take longer, but it does a great job thank you.

elol wrote:

 

Interesting article on the subject of this thread....

 

http://macperformanceguide.com/MountainLion-SaveAs-data-destruction.html

 

 

cheers elo

Also some interesting discussion below the article. Thanks for posting.

>This forum has over 23 thousand views. I was on another that had 67 thousand views.

Which one is this? url?

/ okn

I'm still amazed that Apple is still so entrenched in this whole Autosave/Versions thing. An OS that gets in the way of what the USER wants to do is bad design.

Now, there are quite a few things shouldn't really be a choice. Gatekeeper in ML and other security built in to OS X to keep malware off the system is always good. It still has its limits, but it does a good job. And as it should be, you can turn it off. Case in point. Yesterday I went to install i1 Profiler in ML. It stopped me and said it was an unsigned app and wouldn't be allowed to install. That, along with a message to visit the System Profiler to make any necessary changes. I did that and changed the setting (temporarily) to allow all software. Then I could install i1 Profiler without issue. The point being that if Apple were as stuck on Gatekeeper as Autosave/Versions, I wouldn't have been able to install very expensive, very necessary software. At least for now, and maybe always, you have to have a way to disable it.

You can list a lot of grunt work the OS does without your knowledge all the time that you neither need to know about, or have any reason to change, and that's all good. But, the OS has no right at any time to force you into a specific type of workflow. It's sole function in that respect is to do what the user wants to do, not the other way around.

Much earlier in this thread, I wrote the following:

If it were that great, would there really be 226 million pages on the subject? The majority trying to find out how to turn Duplicate/Autosave/Versions off?

That was a typo on my part. It was 226 thousand, not million. However, there are now 179,000,000 matches to that search. Granted, as you get deeper into the listings, any match in such a phrase without any quotes will return any page with even only one of the words in it, which may not have the slightest thing to do with OS X. But a very large share of the earlier hits do. Within those are many more users responding on the various pages asking how to turn Autosave/Version OFF.

Shouldn't it mean something, anything at all to Apple that a very significant percentage of users hate this function and are looking for a way to kill it?