Is the Save Button Obsolete?

Luther Blissett asks: "I've wondered this for awhile now: why do we still have a Save button? Why isn't it always automatic? Why isn't 'Save As' called 'Name and File'? I understand that in ancient history, when Save was a hit on system resources (e.g. when saving to your 5.25 inch floppy disk), we might give control to the user. Also, the average user then was probably more technically adept (out of necessity) and knew the difference between RAM and storage. But now? Why?"

Comments

Re:I need a save button...

[hey!]

The answer to that concern is that change logging versioning and branching have to become an integral system service. In such a case there'd be a subtle differnce between naming a version and saving, but it'd be there.

1. You create your document "Great Novel".
2. You edit your novel.
3. You shut off your computer.
4. You turn on your computer.
5. You open up "Great Novel" and it takes you where you left off.
6. After editing for three hours, you decide that you really don't want to kill of your hero, so you ask for the document to be rolled back by 50 minutes.
7. You start editing from that point, which automagically creates a document branch.
8. After twenty minutes, you like what you have, and decide to label the version on this branch "best version".
9. You later decide to go back to your abandoned branch, and label it "hero dies".
10. Over the course of months, your version tree becomes extremely bushy. However at any time you can ask for the most recent "best version" or see a history of all versions in which "hero dies".

If I had to say there was a suite of capabilties missing from most applications, it is a comprehensive but easy to use set of logging, versioning and branching capabilities.