Re: [Usability] Merge Open/Save (was "Re: Save Icon")

[Kirk Bridger <kbridger shaw ca>]

Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:

> On 9 Feb, 2006, at 1:36 AM, Joachim Noreiko wrote:
>
> > ...
> > What about "save because there might be a power cut"? Or "save 
> > because I'm going to make a coffee and my cat might jump on the 
> > keyboard"? or just "save because I'm paranoid about crashes"?
> > ...
>
>
> Those are excellent examples of why saving should be something done 
> automatically by the computer, not by humans. The computer will always 
> remember to save; the human won't.


But the computer can't tell that the cat typed the last few paragraphs 
of text, and so it should not be saved automatically.  Perhaps the cat 
moved the cursor after adding a few letters here are there, and the 
owner never notices it.  Auto-save kind of adds work for the user in 
this case.

If we want a user to feel confident that the contents of a file are 
always going to be exactly what they expect, we need to leave the saving 
to the user.  We can add in recovery things like auto-save of temporary 
versions, but ultimately I wouldn't think a user would want the software 
deciding what's savable in their documents.


Kirk