Daring Fireball: Untitled Document Syndrome

2009-02-22

> So one conclusion to draw from this is that developers of document-based applications should protect users from themselves. Your work should be saved even if your document is not. Separate the management of items in the file system from the idea that what you’ve typed or drawn or edited should be “safe”

via Daring Fireball: Untitled Document Syndrome.

Great work from Gruber as always. This is something I’ve argued with many people about, an auto-save, versioning file system. Your operating system should save everything you do to a document automatically and not make you save at all. If I want to save a particular version of a document with a special filename to email out or archive, fine. Maybe I’m just used to using version control systems as a programmer but I’d love to be able to make a bunch of changes to a Word document and be able to undo them even after saving. Or rewrite 2 paragraphs, then decide only one of them is worth keeping. There’s no reason users should have to worry about saving and losing changes. Computers excel at storing stuff, let them do it.


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