The new "Duplicate" then "Save" paradigm is not making me particularly happy.

It must be so automatic to me to go to Finder >> Preferences >> Sidebar and check / uncheck stuff that I didn't know Home wasn't checked by default.

Save as doesn’t make sense if the app auto-saves.

"Save as" is usually used when you want to save it as a different file somewhere else, and most people have cmd-shift-s ingrained in their mind.

This no longer exists and there's no excuse. Autosaving doesn't even do the same job.

I don’t think you understand. This is about paradigm shifts.

Here is how it used to work: You open this old document because you want to create a new one and use the old one as a template. You either Save as right away or (much more likely) you edit for a bit and do a Save as at some later point.

If you do this with auto save you are fucked. (Well, not really. There is now Versions, so starting with Lion this is finally a recoverable mistake.) Editing your document for a bit before doing a Save as with auto save is the same as mistakenly saving your document – overwriting your old document – instead of doing a Save as. That mistake is catastrophic – I know it, I used to make it often enough myself – and users would make it all the time had Apple left Save as in.

Now when you open an old document you will be asked – as soon as you start editing – whether you want to edit the document or duplicate it, thus avoiding that catastrophic mistake. You can also duplicate documents at any time.

The transition period will be painful, that’s for sure, but the end result is pure bliss. It’s worth it.

A lot of changes with Lion are just like this. Sometimes some pain while transitioning is the price for awesomeness.

And what if my workflow involves making multiple files based off the same document? Say I making png buttons in Photoshop. I change the test to "Order" pick save as, type "order.png", change the text to "Cancel" pick save as, type "cancel.png", change the text to "Help" pick save as, type "help.png".

It sounds like that work flow just got massively tedious.

Duplicate → Save, Duplicate → Save.

One step turned two. Worse? Yes. Tedious? No. It’s worth it given the other conceptual changes and the fact that this is very much an edge case.

Here's my work flow when I'm writing a long document: - Create/open "Master copy". - Regularly Save/enable Autosave. - When I have completed a chapter/segment, or before for lunch/supper, I Save and Save As on my backup HDD with a time-stamp/chapter number.

Like this I have one copy that I can edit and is always up to date on my main HDD and I have a whole record of copies on my backup HDDs. If I want to see how I edited chapter 3 whilst I was writing chapter 6 (they're related in the plot) I can.

I can't imagine this being something unknown of in the use of other applications. A franchisee that tracks various performance metrics each hour/day on a rolling database (month/year) sends a copy at regular intervals to the franchise owner/manager so that general franchise performance can be evaluated will have the same problem.

I can see how Duplicate -> Save is "only one click more", but the one-click solution worked well. If the "paradigm shift" is related to auto-saves, why not simply have the auto-saves create a new hidden file by default. Either the changes are saved (cue overwriting of the opened file), or the changes are saved as. If the user exits without saving, the hidden file can be marked for auto-delete in X days/hours, making erroneous exits recoverable. If there's a crash/loss of power, the hidden file is prompted for recovery at the program's next start.

A lot of programs have some kind of auto-save, here is how it works in Microsoft Word. While editing your document, it is auto-saved, but as a new, hidden file. When you manually Save, this new file overwrites the old, and a Save As does the same, but with the new name, not wiping the old document. You can argue that this is messy, and only a hack to get around the paradigm. It all depends on how people want to work, giving the program the responsibility to handle it.

Thanks for the clear explanation of the rationale.

Sure it does, it just auto-saves to whatever your last "Save As" was.

It’s possible to do but it would confuse. It doesn’t make sense conceptually.

I've not used lion so am not familiar with it, but going from what someone else is saying above, you need to 'duplicate' then 'save'. If it's autosaving, this doesn't make sense conceptually either. Why would the app not be autosaving once the duplicated document has been created? Why do you need to save separately?

You still have to save one first time, else the OS wouldn’t know where to put the file and how to name it. Lion only auto saves after that. That is irrespective of whether your create a new file or duplicate a file. (Apple could have been a lot more radical here, I’m unsure whether they should have been. That certainly would have meant a lot more work and it would have been an even more complicated transition.)

I would have thought that the duplicate function would have had 'duplicate it where?' in it.

The only reason I can think of for not having this is so you could make temporary changes to a document and not have them saved - which just seems to be a different way of arranging the cart and horse compared to the 'save as' workflow. With the Save As workflow, temporary changes are simply not saved. With the Duplicate workflow, you have to dupe the document first to avoid unwanted saving, then make your temporary changes. I don't see much of an improvement overall.

The new behavior protects from the following scenario (which I think is very common): Someone wants to use an old document as a template and in the process overwrites the old document. That’s data loss and the user likely becomes unable to even find the new document since it’s saved under the name of the old document.

It used to be the case that users had to actually make a mistake in order for this to happen (i.e. they had to forget to do a Save as and do a Save instead – that happened to me way too often, though), with auto save they would make that mistake automatically and every time.

I think what Apple could do is add a “Duplicate and save” function, I don’t think Save as is salvageable with auto save.