Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

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This is what drives me nuts about apps these days.

In the "old days", an open file was in memory, and you needed to explicitly save it with Save, or save a new version with Save As.

But now everything's flown out the window. If I open a PDF in Preview on my Mac and delete a page from it, it saves the change instantly. If I made a mistake, I can't just close it and re-open the original version. I have to use "File > Revert to > Browse All Versions..."

But it acts differently if my file is on an external drive which doesn't support MacOS file revisions, so when I close the file it gives me this scary long dialog to explicitly make a choice whether to keep my changes or revert, this is my last chance.

Oh and there's no Save As anymore, there's a "File > Duplicate" instead which is never what I want, because the whole point is that sometimes I want to save my changes in a new file but keep the old one without the changes. So I have to do a whole song-and-dance to first duplicate and then save that and then go back to the original and then revert that.

Except it all depends on the application. Some applications still have the traditional Save / Save As, while some have moved onto Duplicate / Revert.

And as you mention, some apps will update the file you have open to reflect changes on disk, while others won't.

And of course cloud apps in the browser just autosave the whole time.

So you have to keep this insanely complex matrix in your head to figure out whether you need to constantly save your work with Cmd+S or not, or whether your work will accidentally overwrite your previous version which you might have been intending to save, or whether something like a sync will overwite the work you have open, and it all depends on just on which application you're using, but whether it's a cloud version or not, and whether you're working off of an external drive or not!

It's maddening. I hate it.

Then there's iWork (AKA Pages / Numbers / Keynote), which internally converts all Microsoft Office documents to its own format and tries really hard to save in that format. If you want to save to the original document, you need to re-export. If you work on a document for hours and your computer crashes, your document is gone, because you were technically working on an "unsaved" file. If you have a habit of pressing cmd+s all the time, you keep getting interrupted by the obnoxious save dialog. There's no way to fix this except by saving every document in Apple's format and then re-exporting to Microsoft's.

Wait, there are people who actually use Apple's Office version for work? I've only ever seen MS Office for macos used in actual business settings, and I have used it myself a few times over the years without issues. Despite running a Macbook in some jobs, I haven't touched Apple's suite in years because of some very bad experiences whenever you need availability beyond you own system. The other way around (mostly) just works, but it's still more headache than simply installing MS office for mac.

I wouldn't strictly call it "work", but I do get the occasional form or two that I need to fill in or whatever. This doesn't happen nearly often enough for me to bother with MS Office, but it does happen sometimes.

Maddening indeed.

And if I decide to save a copy of confidential.ppt to start a new presentation, the first saved version in the history will have all the confidential stuff in it, even if my first action is to delete them. Everyone who has access can now see it.

> If I open a PDF in Preview on my Mac and delete a page from it, it saves the change instantly. If I made a mistake, I can't just close it and re-open the original version.

There's a system setting to (mostly) restore the old behavior: Desktop & Dock > Ask to keep changes when closing documents. Apple applications will still immediately update the file and disk, but it's a lot easier to discard all changes since the last save by closing without saving, and the on-disk file will be rolled back to the previous version. This setting has been around since 2012, I think one OS after they introduced the "auto-save" feature, and I've been using it ever since.

Mac OS, especially in the olden pre-OSX days, was at least consistent here. Files autosave invisibly and frequently, to give the impression that the file in memory and the file on disk are the same thing. So long as the rules are simple and predictable, they can be learned.

But now the different disciplines are mixed. Does it use save as, or duplicate? Does it sync with external changes on the disk, or keep your work open in memory? With apps being so cross-platform these days, they rarely respect the interface guidelines of second class citizen platforms.

>Oh and there's no Save As anymore

Unfold the File menu. Look at Save. Now press and hold Option and look next to Save.

Why they hid it like that, I will never know — some harebrained idea to shift people away from the well-used paradigms you mention, I suppose.

On the one hand, thank you! It never even occurred to me that they kept it but hid it.

On the other hand, I just tried it, and it doesn't actually help at all -- it actually makes things worse. Because it's still autosaving the whole time. "Save As..." saves my current file to a new file... but the old file still has all the changes until that point, despite never having manually saved.

So I still have to go through the whole step of reverting the changes in the first file. Only with "Save As..." it's actually harder, because the first file is no longer open. I have to go find it and open it and revert.

Ugh.

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