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Goodbye, Ctrl-S
An anonymous reader writes "'Save your work!' — This was a rallying cry for an entire generation of workers and students. The frequency and unpredictability of software crashes, power outages, and hardware failures made it imperative to constantly hit that save button. But in 2014? Not so much. My documents are automatically saved (with versioning) every time I make a change. My IDE commits code changes automatically. Many webforms will save drafts of whatever data I'm entering. Heck, even the games I play have an autosave feature. It's an interesting change — the young generation will grow up with an implicit trust that whatever they type into a computer will stay there. Maybe this is my generation's version of: 'In my day, we had to get up and walk across the room to change the channel on the TV!' In any case, it has some subtle but interesting effects on how people write, play, and create. No longer do we have to have constant interruptions to worry about whether our changes are saved — but at the same time, we don't have that pause to take a moment and reflect on what we've written. I'm sure we've all had moments where our hands hover over a save/submit button before changing our minds and hammering the backspace key. Maybe now we'll have to think before we write."
TFA doesn't mention this and, if the summary writer meant "commit" as in version control commit, this would be a killer bug in the whole process.
Version control is not meant to be used as a backup, every commit should be deliberate, reviewed and well explained in the comments. Vide the post mortem of the heartbleed bug (or many other similar ones).
That's honestly the first thing I thought of. "Saving a document" to me is "Esc-:w".
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
What if I don't want to save my changes?
"You can use the 'undo' command they say..."
Yes but the undo command isn't persistent between applications, much less a power failure.
You haven't solved anything, you've merely shifted the problem.
Sometimes, I don't want to save. I will open a document with the explicit purpose of making changes that I don't want saved. Even Gmail's autosave has burned me pretty badly. I spent an hour typing out a very long email. Toward the end of it, something happened, and the whole body of text was gone. I'm still not really sure if it was a keyboard shortcut I inadvertently triggered, browser bug, or what. But I just thought "no biggie... I'll just go back to the auto-saved version". So I open up the autosaved version, and the latest auto-save happened AFTER the email body was deleted. So much for autosave @#$!#$@!!!!
Apple users don't Control, they Command you insensitive clod!
Games that autosave only on checkpoints is a hangover from old consoles that didn't have the memory to allows gamers to save when they wanted to. Why this horrible restriction continues to perpetuate to modern PC games is beyond me. It's a throwback and it's annoying.
I can hear some people saying "It forces suspense in the game! You don't know when the next safe place is!". If you want that kind of suspense, let the game auto save for you. Personally if supper is ready I don't want to have to tell my wife "Wait, I know there must be an auto save waypoint around here somewhere, hold on while I play for another 5 - 10 minutes looking for it!" I want to hit cntl-s, quit, and go have supper.
Is it so hard to put 'save when you want' in to a game?
end-of-rant
Why would anyone want to autocommit possibly broken code?
:wq ... nuff said!
Look at iOS - how many apps have a "save" button at all? It's expressly discouraged from the Human Interface Guidelines
With no Save, how do you Revert? Or do Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for iOS expect applications to offer unlimited undo/redo that persists across reboots of the device?
I used to be a Mac fan.
That's sad. Because now I'm not. Apple seems to only care about new gizmos and animating everything, rather than sticking with creating useful and predictable interfaces.
Ive is the worst thing for the UI that I've ever seen. It's soul deadening.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
It's not just apple, Microsoft and everyone else is catering to the dumb.
Remove features, hide "advanced" things. etc.. the MOST frustrating app in the world is MS word... i spend more time undoing what it is trying to help me with than anything else. why cant I have a single option, "Expert mode" that disabled ALL the freaking help shit and un-hides all functions?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.