Is the Save Button Obsolete? 188
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?"
Marginal Cases (Score:3, Interesting)
As opposed to what? (Score:3, Interesting)
There still is a difference between RAM and storage and there's no indication that that will change any time soon. A Save button gives us the control that we still need. In a word processor, for example, a quick typer could generate as many as 15 or more individual changes to the document per second. Yes, you could save at predefined intervals, but that number would need to be tweaked depending on the software and hardware situation. There's no one save interval that would fit all needs.
There is another possible reason for the save button to exist... occasionally there are situations where I want to open a document and even possibly modify it but not save it. Rare, I know, but automatic saving would be a drawback in this case.
In the end, removing the Save button from applications would only introduce more problems than it would cure. In an ideal world, I can see where it would work (Apple would be the first to do it), but with today's hardware, software, and users as error-prone as they are, it's much better to just leave it there.
Re:The save button is about as obsolete as Undo (Score:3, Interesting)
When talking with my users, I have even referred to closing a document without saving it as a "high level undo". If you completely trash something, just don't save it and start over from the good saved copy. Autosave might deprive you of a good saved copy.
Re:I need a save button... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Save obsolete? NEVER! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:since day one (Score:4, Interesting)
On a car, you need a clunky H-gate gear lever a foot long, with a complicated and expensive synchomesh mechanism, or an even more complex and expensive automatic gearbox - all to work around the bad gear shift induced by spinning the input shaft at engine speed. On a bike, there's a slow-spinning gearbox that consequently needs no synchromesh and can be fed by a wet multiplate clutch light enough to be lifted with the fingers of the left hand. Only in the past few years have car manufactures finally invented expensive mechanisms to reproduce the "sequential shift" that bikes have had since the 20's
So yes, a steering wheel on a bike is exactly what the original author raised as the issue with the Save command - it's an ugly and inefficient way of doing things, dictated by the design constraints of the a bad design back in the last century.