Goodbye, Ctrl-S 521
An anonymous reader writes "'Save your work!' — This was a rallying cry for an entire generation of workers and students. The frequency and unpredictability of software crashes, power outages, and hardware failures made it imperative to constantly hit that save button. But in 2014? Not so much. My documents are automatically saved (with versioning) every time I make a change. My IDE commits code changes automatically. Many webforms will save drafts of whatever data I'm entering. Heck, even the games I play have an autosave feature. It's an interesting change — the young generation will grow up with an implicit trust that whatever they type into a computer will stay there. Maybe this is my generation's version of: 'In my day, we had to get up and walk across the room to change the channel on the TV!' In any case, it has some subtle but interesting effects on how people write, play, and create. No longer do we have to have constant interruptions to worry about whether our changes are saved — but at the same time, we don't have that pause to take a moment and reflect on what we've written. I'm sure we've all had moments where our hands hover over a save/submit button before changing our minds and hammering the backspace key. Maybe now we'll have to think before we write."
Commits code changes automatically (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA doesn't mention this and, if the summary writer meant "commit" as in version control commit, this would be a killer bug in the whole process.
Version control is not meant to be used as a backup, every commit should be deliberate, reviewed and well explained in the comments. Vide the post mortem of the heartbleed bug (or many other similar ones).
Re:Bah, we already said goodbye to CTRL-S years ag (Score:4, Insightful)
That's honestly the first thing I thought of. "Saving a document" to me is "Esc-:w".
You missed the biggest downside (Score:5, Insightful)
"You can use the 'undo' command they say..."
Yes but the undo command isn't persistent between applications, much less a power failure.
You haven't solved anything, you've merely shifted the problem.
Auto-save is NOT your friend (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Auto-save is NOT your friend (Score:5, Insightful)
You insensitive clod! (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple users don't Control, they Command you insensitive clod!
Re:Auto-save is NOT your friend (Score:5, Insightful)
A properly implemented auto-save feature does not overwrite the original document; it saves a secondary copy, to be used only if the system crashes and you need to recover your edits.
This is what MS Office does. Of course, no one here uses MS Office, so that's not much help...
Games: Autosave is the devil (Score:2, Insightful)
I can hear some people saying "It forces suspense in the game! You don't know when the next safe place is!". If you want that kind of suspense, let the game auto save for you. Personally if supper is ready I don't want to have to tell my wife "Wait, I know there must be an auto save waypoint around here somewhere, hold on while I play for another 5 - 10 minutes looking for it!" I want to hit cntl-s, quit, and go have supper.
Is it so hard to put 'save when you want' in to a game?
end-of-rant
Re:IDE autocommit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would anyone want to autocommit possibly broken code?
Re:Never used this keystroke (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Commits code changes automatically (Score:3, Insightful)
Version control is not meant to be used as a backup, every commit should be deliberate, reviewed and well explained in the comments. Vide the post mortem of the heartbleed bug (or many other similar ones).
Only if you have the ancient, outdated, bad, deprecated, idiotic, CVS view of version control. To quote Linus "if you still use CVS, you're stupid, and probably ugly". Hopefully no one still does, but that "branching is expensive" mindset persists.
A commit is precisely a backup, nothing more. A way to make you your work survive dropping your laptop. A merge back into a real branch should be the point of careful review.
Can you undo a change you made before a reboot? (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at iOS - how many apps have a "save" button at all? It's expressly discouraged from the Human Interface Guidelines
With no Save, how do you Revert? Or do Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for iOS expect applications to offer unlimited undo/redo that persists across reboots of the device?
Re:Never used this keystroke (Score:3, Insightful)
I used to be a Mac fan.
That's sad. Because now I'm not. Apple seems to only care about new gizmos and animating everything, rather than sticking with creating useful and predictable interfaces.
Ive is the worst thing for the UI that I've ever seen. It's soul deadening.
Re:Never used this keystroke (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not just apple, Microsoft and everyone else is catering to the dumb.
Remove features, hide "advanced" things. etc.. the MOST frustrating app in the world is MS word... i spend more time undoing what it is trying to help me with than anything else. why cant I have a single option, "Expert mode" that disabled ALL the freaking help shit and un-hides all functions?