A question for those that care about such things.
When you have autosave turned on, do you expect that closing the document will automatically save it without prompting?
Pro: You’ve already committed to having your data saved without your requesting it.
Con: While a document is open, there’s always undo. Once you’ve closed it, you’re stuck with what you’ve got.
Caveat: I’d rather not have to add a preference to change this behavior. It should “just work.”
Thoughts?
I would favour a warning on closing. To me, the prompt is helpful in confirming that my file will be saved if I confirm it (otherwise it just looks like the program quit, possibly without storing my updates) – and it does give the option not to save – hopefully losing some unfortunate mess that I’ve made of my document…
I think autosave doesn’t mean automatic save when I quit. There should be a warning when Notae quits: do I really want to quit without saving this last change? I think the user has to decide, not the software.
Just my little grain of salt
I think you both make sense. I just have a feature request sitting here that asks for the opposite behavior and I was kind of skeptical of it. I rather like the prompt and think that silent saves are disturbing in a document-based application. If this was using a single store somewhere I would expect complete transparency, but not with documents.
I am a big proponent of Jef Raskin’s ideas and one of them is to have a real autosave. I guess I am not the one who requested the feature but it sounds good, it’s just what autosave is for.
In the perfect world the undo history would be saved with the file so one would not lose anything but I can see that to be a bit tricky to implement.
Open the program – do an edit – close the program. That is the ideal, no playing around with saving and useless dialogs.
And if it were not a document-based program, I’d agree entirely. Yet, it is and that’s what makes the decision difficult. Documents have traditionally not done this and it might upset some folks that it does.
Of course, autosave is not on by default so it could be called an effect of having it, too.
By the way, what do you guys think of Time Machine that wil come with Mac OS 10.5?