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Comment by vietor | Hacker News Reader

How exactly does he propose to undo the closing of an application, as the application developer? It was his canonical example for the entire first half of the post, and then he jumped to trivially undo-able actions within an application when it came time for examples.

How does he feel about the UX tradeoffs of blocking state synchronization to non-volatile storage for every user action? Better or worse then usually not losing data on an unsaved close?

How about the UX of restoring state when you re-open the application? Should the user see the last state every time? The last manually saved state with an option to roll-forward? A huge obnoxious recovery dialog box like OpenOffice when you kill it without saving?

These are the questions the first half of the article setup, not trivially reversible actions within an application.

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E.g. mobile apps just save their state all the time and revert when you reopen them. Imagine if MS Word didn't ask you before it exits, but instead it asks you when you open it if you want to restore previous state.

MS Word does ask me all the time to restore previous state. Usually because it crashes more often than I close it.

Right, and both of those involve UX tradeoffs. Which was my point and why I gave them both as options in my initial comment. Having read the first half of the article, I was expecting the second half to address the issues which these various options raise.

Sure you can "Just save state all the time", but doing so involves tradeoffs. Tradeoffs which were not addressed at all in the article.

Your MS Word example is exactly what OpenOffice does when it's been closed without saving. It's really obnoxious. I was hoping to read some UX insight into how to make those kinds of actions less obnoxious without losing their helpful functionality when it's needed.

In general I agree with the core idea of the article. But it lacked useful discussion about the hard UX problems involved, opting instead for some easy in-application examples.

> I was hoping to read some UX insight into how to make those kinds of actions less obnoxious without losing their helpful functionality when it's needed.

An initial ideas I had, fairly trivial in the context of OpenOffice and Word asking to return to your previous state:

If a short period of time has elapsed since closing the application, simply resume state. Short period of time would have to be determine, of course. But it's fair to say that if I close an application and open it again within a minute, I probably want to resume the state. Additional conditions could be added based on testing: didn't save in the last close might be a good indicator.

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