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Goodbye, Ctrl-S

Posted by Soulskill on from the couldn't-save-itself dept.

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."

2 of 521 comments (clear)

  1. Wow, déjà vu by hubie · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This sounded so familiar to me, but I can't believe it has been over eight years ago. I must be remembering a similar story posted much more recently.

  2. Re:Never used this keystroke by Noah+Haders · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm a mac fan, but I have to say that apple screwed the pooch with mavericks on this one. for the stock apple programs they got rid of the save button entirely and now everything auto saves. This is ok, but the really bad part is they got rid of save as - you know, you make some changes but decide you want to keep the original so you make this file v2 or whatever? Even worse, bowing to pressure they added back in the save as, but accessible as a secondary choice with option-click.

    the whole thing is just weird and to tell you the truth it made me stop using the apple programs so I never got used to it or fully figured it out.