“Say good-bye to manual saving. Auto Save in Mac OS X Lion automatically saves your work — while you work — so you don’t have to. Lion saves changes in the working document instead of creating additional copies, making the best use of available disk space. The lock feature prevents inadvertent changes from being saved and automatically locks documents after two weeks. And the revert feature returns you to the state the document was in when you last opened it, so you can feel free to experiment with confidence.”
So instead of "save" which seemed rather simple to me, you have to learn two new features such as "lock" and "revert", which do not seem so simple to me.
Oh and also, now you have no idea what data is saved in your documents. Your documents can carry in them hidden past versions without you being aware of it. Which can prove very embarrassing in many business situations. Which means that anyone that handles sensitive data will have to create or buy complex new software that scrubs all documents of old data. (this is already an issue with Microsoft Word and its proclivity to save all kinds of dangerous metadata).
So when before you merely had to save stuff, now you have to worry about reverting, scrubbing, etc. Thank you GUI elves.
The thing is, you tend to hit save every other second, while you probably only need to revert/lock like once or twice a day.
Think of lock just like commiting to your personal source control. Revert than maps perfectly to SVN revert. You work just like you always do. You commit whenever you finished some task and want to start a new one. You revert whenever you found out that you did some wrong stuff since your last commit. I do these actions every day today.
But I almost never discard all changes since the last save. Hence, I'd be glad to have the OS save my work implicitly for me and take care of my personal source control system. The proposed system would actually save me a lot of work!
I think that losing unsaved work is a bigger and more common problem than those downsides you mention. Locking and reverting is not something mandatory, users can simply ignore those features until they need them. On the whole I see automatic saving as a nice step towards computers as an appliance that can be used with less and less regard to implementation details. (The security side is an interesting point, I wonder how they solve it.)
The remarkable thing is that for thirty years we've been using tools that default to destroying your work. I can't think of a better example of our collective tolerance for janky technology than the persistence of such a glaring regression from the typewriters (etc) that personal computers replaced.
Makes a lot of sense, if you kept a transparent source control of every change made to something and constantly updated it on each change. The issue though is how everyone is used to save.
I guess a regular save can be the same idea as a tag in version control with the automated stuff to, I think the next OSX was doing something like this?
> Makes a lot of sense, if you kept a transparent source control of every change made to something and constantly updated it on each change. The issue though is how everyone is used to save.
True enough, but they're also getting used to transparent saving. You don't 'save' your state in Gmail; if Firefox or your computer crashes, you didn't 'save' the current tab state. And so on. The state is just there and always up-to-date.
If you look, you can see how they are saving in the background every X seconds (such as Gmail's composition warning), but I imagine most people simply gloss over that.
I think your overall point is solid, that the application (or os) should be making sure it always has a saved state of my document.
But...there would still be a need for a way to specify where the document should be stored on the filesystem. For instance when writing software, files have to go in specific places. The file can't just be saved anywhere, or in some application specific bucket, I need to be able to specify the location.
