Adrian Sutton: “Expect to see a lot more of that as applications take better advantage of CoreData and/or provide built-in versioning systems for their files. When you think about it, why should you have to remember to save instead of just having the ability to undo as far back as you like?”
It’s not the first time I hear this. I can’t remember who already wrote very convincingly about this subject, but the basic idea is that the traditional “File Save” operation of GUI applications is terribly botched. Users should never be forced to remember to save new and modified documents. Also, having to put the file in a specific directory inside a hierarchical filesystem is something that most users would like to be spared of. Applications should provide automatic save and versioning. Documents should be retrieved by search and not by looking at long lists of file names.
I can see this very clearly now that my daughter (7 years old) is starting to use TextEdit on my Powerbook to write little stories or poems. Opening the program or existing documents is very intuitive: you just click (or double-click, harder) on them. But I had to teach her to always save her documents before quitting and still I find myself remembering it to her once in a while.
I’m glad to see that Apple, with CoreData and Spotlight, seems to be ahead of the curve on this issue.
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