Re: [Usability] GNOME3: Handling/Opening Documents (Website for Contributing Ideas?)

[Diego Moya <turingt gmail com>]

On 20/04/05, Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com> 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.