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Comment by kalleboo | Hacker News Reader

> duplicating before editing (bad)

Why is this bad?

edit: Why are people downvoting me for asking this question? I'm genuinely curious.

Because it's a horrible UX paradigm to require. If 'Save As...' had never existed, it wouldn't be unreasonable, but it is (was) a reasonable behavior that every other system I'm aware of has maintained.

This passive versioning thing is quite nice in some aspects, but it's very unknown with most people I've seen. They see a file changed, they assume it's stuck like that now and the original is gone forever. Why would they expect otherwise? Their unsaved file gave no indication of being saved. Every application they open it in, and everyone they email it to, will only get the most-recent version. Even the file-system doesn't tell you when you have multiple versions of something.

I see it as part of the iOSification of OS X, to appeal to iPad/iPhone halo converts. My phone has never asked me if I want to "Save changes".

I like the feature, to be clear. I just think it's horribly executed, and the education side has been even worse.

The problem is that they took something. Then they changed it, giving it multiple nearly-invisible modes it can be in, which changes from application to application (not all have a 'revert' option, even for versioned files). Then they didn't tell anyone.

For instance. I just cropped this file. How do I know the original still exists? http://cl.ly/image/2L2X0x042W0N

Here, I opened it in another application. Are there multiple versions? http://cl.ly/image/3Y1m3C2r1r2f

What about in the File menu? http://cl.ly/image/0F2o2H2i3Z2f

Finder? http://cl.ly/image/1C0S3z3Z0q30 or http://cl.ly/image/463p0O1I3q1C or http://cl.ly/image/1F191E3b3U1W ?

(edit) Oh, cool - there's a "Versions" column. Maybe that has it: http://cl.ly/image/2703273U3z2U

This is bad.

Always assume that every change you make is saved automatically, much like cutting down a physical photo.

If you still want the original photo, and another cut down version, you would use a photo copier to Duplicate the original, then cut the copy.

"Always assume that every change you make is saved automatically" - You must have had a hard time dealing with computers until now :)

The real-world analogy makes sense, but it doesn't fit with how things have behaved. This is likely an improvement overall, but it's creating a period of upheaval and damage to people's property where better notification of the changes would make it a non-issue.

To modify and drag out the analogy to absurdity: say you previously made cropped photos by photocopying with a white rectangle mask revealing only the portions you wanted duplicated. Now, suddenly, you find that photocopying with the mask in place crops your original photo, without telling you. Nested a layer deep in the photocopier's menu is an option to undo the changes to your original.

I claim this is fine... if and only if the photocopier tells you of this before or immediately after, so you know to copy the whole thing first, and then cut, or use the 'revert' option. In a couple years that may be unnecessary, but not right now.

When I spent hours in a wet darkroom, I used a masking frame and the enlarger head height adjustment to crop a print, having previously marked up a work print. The negative was untouched.

The larger point I am making is that by referring to 'real' objects, we will return to a point where there is no system wide consistency any more. Case in point: editing audio tape or cine film did destroy the edited version, which is why we used prints/copy tapes.

Disclaimer: I don't use Mac OS. I do look to Apple for UI design however.

iOS doesn't show "EDITED" next to the filename in any window title bars either. I would think most people seeing "filename.txt -- edited" in a window title bar (such as in osx 10.8 TextEdit) would assume the file has not yet been saved.

It requires me to decide whether or not I'm going to want to keep a change, before I've even started on it. Otherwise I have to plow through a big undo stack, even assuming undo is supported (and persisted) for everything I did.

There's a "Revert" menu item that reverts to the last opened state, and if you managed to close the file, there's Versions.

The change is really confusing to long time computer users. I wonder if Apple could have avoided this confusion by changing the names of "Save" and friends to something completely different.

Since original the file is saved, there's nothing preventing you from closing the file. "Managing to" is as easy as closing the window with cmd-w or hitting the red dot. Previously you could say 'no' to the 'save changes' dialog that popped up reliably - now it's just gone and there's essentially no indication that you can fix it.

Look at it the other way: With the old system, if you pressed "Don't save" to that dialog by mistake, you lost everything. With the new system, it's basically impossible to lose anything (the only way is if you don't notice for long enough that the old version gets reaped).

If you know it exists. And how long until it gets reaped? (I honestly have no idea. probably long enough for it to not matter, though, I'll admit)

I'll try another way too. You had unsaved changes. You chose 'save as', which you know makes a new file. Why would you want to save the current changes to both files, ending up with two identical ones? Filename aside, they're the same file, but one can be reverted and the other can't. That's what copy/paste/duplicate is for.

edit: there are plenty of valid cases for this, but they're mostly specialty (saving stages of changes in e.g. design work). why would the average person under average use want to save-as and end up with two identical files?

I often find myself making a base model and then iterating down different paths using saved as on the fly with no prior knowledge of the number of iterations (duplicates) I will end up with.

No idea why you were downvoted, I'm interested in learning about this too.

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