Hello,

since I am not a member, I'll reply to all comments all at once.

>Your mom stays up all night working on her computer? Cool mom!
>
Yeah, she is the best, but a little bit too workaholic. :)

>While many applications have "save backup file" as an option that gets
>nasty after a while too mainly because the do not clearly represent the
>information they contain.
>  
>
Yes, backup files are only partial solution, because with enough trying,
you can overwrite (or replace with trivial content) them too, and they
clutter the normal files.

>In some cases this might be very intrusive on system performance. Many
>of the vector and bitmap files I work on require 15-30 seconds to save.
>
It could work just during save or like normal backup. It would just
prevent any information to be removed.

Regarding my second suggestion, "log of GUI operations":

>Well, some applications already have this ability. First one that comes to my 
>mind is Adobe Photoshop (and probably other Adobe products) which displays 
>all undoable commands in a tool window. Some KDE apps have this, too. Karbon 
>comes to my mind.
>
Yes, I know about undo history, but this is not what I mean. I mean
literally to log all (nontrivial) operations you did in GUI. So not only
operations that actually modify current file, but also settings changes,
dialog invocations, searches etc. There are 3 reasons, why would you
want it:
1. As a feedback, how computer understands what you did, and if it did
what you wanted it to do. For instance, my mother asks (after saving a
file): "Is the file really saved?" So she could go here, and see, "9:32
Saved document test.doc in file /c/test.doc as rtf." and be happy.
2. As a possible mean to revert something, maybe (but not necessarily)
tied with undo. At least, you could find what you did, after you realize
you did something wrong.
3. As a reminder of what you did. How often do you have a program you
use a little, and you know that last week you discovered an interesting
feature, but you don't remember how exactly you did it. So you would
look into the log. I, for one (and I am a power user, since I use a
command line often), would use it just because of this capability.

Yeah, it could affect performance (but today computers are fast and
users are mostly slow), and most operations in log would be trivial.
However, the nontrivial ones are a good reason to have it. In command
line shell, there is a similar concept - .bash_history. You have a lot
of trivial commands like "cd"s and "ls"s here too.

Also, don't forget the psychology. I think it's important for
inexperienced users to play around a little, and knowing that nothing
can go wrong (or at least, there is always easy way to know what's gone
wrong and to fix it) can help a lot.

Best regards,
Jan Samohyl
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