Re: [Usability] [RFC] Proposed AbiWord preferences dialog mockup

[Dom Lachowicz <domlachowicz yahoo com>]

> > I'm going to have to agree with Alan. Auto-save is
> not an obvious thing
> > to have enabled and can have undesirable
> side-effects.
> 
> I'd go as far as to say that anything BUT auto-save
> is non-obvious. I'll
> leave it to mpt to explain this:
> 
> http://mpt.phrasewise.com/2002/03/11#a146

All I'll say about MPT is that he's
well-intentioned...

Auto-save is a band-aid on a much larger problem and
it's not clear how one would/could best accomplish
this. I don't think that auto-save is the answer, nor
do I believe it is necessarily better than hitting the
save button (which you still have to do at some point
anyways if you want to persist your document). It's
also not clear to me that the desired behavior should
happen at the application level, or even at the
software one.

Often, saving is fundamentally equivalent to putting a
"seal of approval" on a particular revision of the
document. Once you write a letter, it stays written,
right? Unless you cumple up the letter and toss it in
the garbage - the equivalent of hitting the 'X' button
on the window bar. Otherwise it was just 'scratch
paper.' Saving the file is fundamentally no different
than putting it inside of a file cabinet, folder,
etc... Traditionally, if you care about your work in
the real world, you keep track of it, file it,
organize it, even if it simply means putting your
paper in a well-known position on your desk.

This is also the de-facto behavior for any similar
piece of software, such as MSWord or WordPerfect.
That's not to say that we can't strive to do better,
but it will be counter-intuitive and "non-obvious" to
a user of MSWord how to save a document in AbiWord.
This is a bad thing.

Finally, this sort of behavior should be well defined
and implemented across the desktop (or better, OS and
across OSes) as a whole. It does no good to single us
out in particular. Until such a policy is codified in
some major document such as the HIG, I won't even
consider changing this. Auto-save in AbiWord will
remain optional, and disabled by default.

Cheers,
Dom

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