On 20/04/05, Sean Middleditch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Instant save also is not safe for most file formats. Unless the file > format itself has built-in undo support, an automatic save feature would > ensure that you could never undo any changes you make if your > application crashes or the computer shuts down (power loss).
A system in which all applications have built-in undo support is the usability utopia - it is a goal that every programmer should try to achieve. You're right in that it is a prerequisite for an automatic save policy. > It also > means that documents will be in an "inconsistent state" while you're > editing, with no way to let other users/applications fetch the document > in a consistent pre-edit state. The proper solution to achieve this effect is a versioning system, not the Save function. This was a hack from the time where disk access was really slow. The mental model for "edit in memory" and "save to disk when done" is ugly and difficult for non-programmers, and has the problem that closing the application or a system crash destroys the partial edits. Saving changes to disk should be done as a background process, the same way that open files are treated by the operating system. This way the OS can optimize performance, and more important, the user is freed from that responsibility. _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
