My biggest problem is that Apple is not explaining these changes.
With the original Save/Save As, the concept was easy to understand after someone took 30 sec to explain it to you. You knew exactly what was happening.
But with Apple's new changes, Apple has made autosave and versions the new paradigm (awesome), but they've done a terrible job at explaining how to do anything but that.
How do I edit something and then save that edit as a new document without affecting the original? If I copy a file, does the whole version history get copied too? What if I send it to someone? What if I want to delete the version history period? What if I want to "duplicate" a file but not save it anywhere, because I just want to mess around with changes for a while?
I've been using Lion since it came out, and I don't really know the correct answers to any of those questions.
The version history is stored by the file system and not by the file itself. If you copy the document you don't store any of the version history and you can't revert (from my experience).
Also, if you send the file to someone they get the latest changes, they don't get any history... the history is snapshots made by the OS much like Time Machine does for backups, except it is done every so often automatically (auto save) and not to an external drive.
The only real cock-up is the Save As. Save As should save the new file, and revert the old file back to what it originally was (the last time I explicitly saved, not the spot that auto save last saved).
If you want to modify a copy of the file, before you start your modifications you simply choose File -> Duplicate and it opens the same document but with a different name. When you save that one it will have an entirely new history associated with it.
The fact that it is a file system feature that is baked into the OS means that all apps can take advantage of it if they want and the overhead is small. It also means that apps no longer need to keep notes about what modifications were done to what, instead being able to rely on the auto save feature. The other nice thing is that since it is not part of the document and is outside of it, data leakage is much less of an issue than with other file formats such as Microsoft Word where recovering previous text is rather simple and can lead to data leaking that you wouldn't want leaking.
> If you want to modify a copy of the file,
> before you start your modifications you simply
> choose File -> Duplicate and it opens the same
> document but with a different name. When you
> save that one it will have an entirely new
> history associated with it.
An entirely new history? Doesn't that kind of
suck? It would be preferable to have the copy also
retain history prior to duplication.
> The fact that it is a file system feature that
> is baked into the OS means that all apps can
> take advantage of it if they want and the
> overhead is small. It also means that apps no
> longer need to keep notes about what
> modifications were done to what, instead being
> able to rely on the auto save feature.
It also means it is non-portable, and you can lose
this history when backing things up (unless you
only use Time Machine for backups presumably).
> The other nice thing is that since it is not
> part of the document and is outside of it,
> data leakage is much less of an issue than
> with other file formats such as Microsoft Word
> where recovering previous text is rather
> simple and can lead to data leaking that you
> wouldn't want leaking.
I'll agree with this. Maybe the middle ground is
something similar to OS X's metadata dot-files
(i.e. ._.filename).
I think one of the biggest issues I take with it
is that by making it a part of the document editor
itself, you make it seem (to the user) as if it's
a feature of the application/format, and not a
feature of the operating system that has just been
integrated into the application. Without any other
sort of explanation the user will probably assume
that this is all stored in the document, and be in
for a surprize when they copy it somewhere else,
and the history disappears.
> An entirely new history? Doesn't that kind of suck? It would be preferable to have the copy also retain history prior to duplication.
Then the application and the file format should probably have a way of storing older texts by itself, much like Microsoft Word. Although you do lose the data leakage protection. If I make a Duplicate of an image or file I generally want that as my starting point and not have the entire version history copied as well.
> It also means it is non-portable, and you can lose this history when backing things up (unless you only use Time Machine for backups presumably).
Yes, it is non-portable. For those apps where that is an issue there is always the choice of baking it into the file format itself.
As for backing it up, you are able to back-up /.DocumentRevisions-V100/ along with everything else you back-up. This is where auto-save saves the files, and its various versions.
> I'll agree with this. Maybe the middle ground is something similar to OS X's metadata dot-files (i.e. ._.filename).
No, please for the love of all that is holy please do not drop more ._.crap in my directory trees. Some of us still live and breath command line or connect to various non-Mac OS X machines and seeing those files everywhere is extremely annoying.
As for better user education on Versions, I'll agree with that one hundred percent. The functionality is provided free of charge to developers using NSDocument (from reading other peoples threads on this HN thread) and thus does require some help from the program, if they read/write using POSIX they won't get free support for it.
If you want to modify a copy of the file, before you start your modifications you simply choose File -> Duplicate and it opens the same document but with a different name.
What if you only decide that you want to save as a different file after you are half way through your modifications?
Hit File -> Duplicate ... save the new copy as a different file name, in the original File -> Revert -> Last Opened. Now your Duplicate contains all of the new stuff, and your old file contains all of the old stuff.
Duplicate and Revert Original should be an option, unfortunately it isn't.
That's how it worked in Lion, but Mountain Lion behaves differently -- you get the duplicate with its file name selected, so you can rename it, but the original stays modified unless you think to immediately pick "Revert to last saved version".
I actually liked the Lion behavior better. (Now I wish I'd had the chance to try out the Mountain Lion beta before release, so I could have filed a bug for this.) That's what we get for everyone complaining about the lack of "Save As"...
With the original Save/Save As, the concept was easy to understand after someone took 30 sec to explain it to you. You knew exactly what was happening.
But with Apple's new changes, Apple has made autosave and versions the new paradigm (awesome), but they've done a terrible job at explaining how to do anything but that.
How do I edit something and then save that edit as a new document without affecting the original? If I copy a file, does the whole version history get copied too? What if I send it to someone? What if I want to delete the version history period? What if I want to "duplicate" a file but not save it anywhere, because I just want to mess around with changes for a while?
I've been using Lion since it came out, and I don't really know the correct answers to any of those questions.