What autosave really needs is a reliable differential incremental save engine. This could cache diffs and perform a merge during "slow moments" of user inactivity. I wonder if this is where Apple might be heading with this technology.
~ Erik Sent from my iCapsule somewhere in orbit On 2012-09-07, at 11:15 AM, Kyle Sluder <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Sep 7, 2012, at 11:05 AM, Charles Srstka wrote: >> On Sep 7, 2012, at 12:54 PM, Kyle Sluder <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>>> - An app that opens a particularly large or complex document type such >>>> that the save operation would take a large amount of time won't work very >>>> well in the autosave paradigm. >>> >>> This problem already exists with the old timer-based autosave paradigm. >>> If saving is slow, you need to smarten your save algorithm. >> >> What if the file you're saving is 4 GB in size and you're saving it to a >> laptop hard drive? No amount of "smartening" is going to fix that. > > I guess the question is, "why are you saving a 4GB file?" Media editors > don't do that; they split the file into chunks and bundle them in a > project folder. For other apps, we have document wrappers. > > If you really need to edit a single monolithic multi-GB file, there are > ways to do it other than holding the entire thing in memory and > overwriting the file on disk. For example, you can stream the file to > disk as it's created and maintain a dirty list, or mmap the file and > just let the VM system take care of it. > >> Also, some file types are just large and complex, and take a certain >> amount of computing power to save no matter how "smart" you are. Have you >> ever tried opening and editing a really high-resolution image file with >> Pixelmator with autosave turned on? It gets almost unusable. With a video >> editor, it would be even worse. > > No I have not, but what I have done is used versions of OmniOutliner > that use old-school autosave on gigantic documents customers have sent > us (usually with huge collections of image attachments). Whenever the > autosave timer expires, the app freezes for ten seconds at a time > because it's doing a naive rewrite-the-world save. This isn't a product > of Lion autosave. > >> Sure there are, and I gave you four of them (which doesn't necessarily >> rule out other cases that just aren't coming to mind at the moment). > > The reason I replied to your message is that I don't believe you > succeeded. You enumerated cases for which perhaps no good > *implementation* of Lion Autosave currently exists. But that does not > imply anything about the applicability of the *paradigm.* > > --Kyle Sluder > _______________________________________________ > > Cocoa-dev mailing list ([email protected]) > > Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. > Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com > > Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: > https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/erik.stainsby%40roaringsky.ca > > This email sent to [email protected] _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list ([email protected]) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [email protected]
