Command-S has to go!

Have you ever kept track of how often you hit Command-S on an average day? However you use your Mac, whatever kind of apps you are using: chances are that hitting that comforting key combination every few minutes has become a subconscious habit for you. For me, it's so bad, I sometimes hit Command-S while filling out a web form, wondering where the heck that Save As… dialog box came from. The question is: Why? Why do we do this? Why isn't there a better way? Oh, wait, there is!

If you have an iPhone at hand, try this: open Notes, create a new note, and then hold down the power key to switch off the iPhone. Re-launch the phone, and you're exactly where you left off, although, courtesy of the Notes app, you did not have to explicitly save anything. No explicit saving, no worries.

Try the same thing on a Mac, and you should better make sure to hit all the right buttons when asked if you want to save or discard unsaved changes for all your open documents. And if you have any as-yet-unsaved documents, take a moment to give them names and decide where to save them.

Admittedly, the iPhone has one major advantage when it comes to document management: its default user interface does not have an equivalent to the Mac's Finder, so that any documents are only accessed directly from within their parent applications: email attachments are only viewed within Mail, notes are only handled within Notes, etc. Still, there are some applications on the Macintosh that do behave in a similarly user-friendly way, e.g., Stickies: there is no need to save newly created notes. In fact, that little application does not even have a "Save" command.

I just wish that the way we save documents would be changed system-wide, so I wouldn't ever have to bother with manually saving a document ever again.

Save that for me, Mac, will you!

Some of Apple's own iLife applications use a method that might be useful as a starting point: when creating a new project in GarageBand, the first thing that pops up is the "Save As..." dialog, in which you name that project and decide where to store it. And that is exactly what, in my humble opinion, every application that works with documents should do: instead of saving a document before closing its window, it should be saved right after it is created, i.e., well before you invested any time and effort in that document's contents!

After that, the software would save any open documents automatically: regularly while you're working on them, and every time you close a doc window. In other words, once you've created and named a document, you should never have to hit Command-S for that document again. Ever.

Unless you wanted to explicitly create a snapshot, or version, of that file, similar to the date-stamped backups in Time Machine, so you could switch between these different versions. Instead of answering the question of whether you'd like to save or discard changes every time a document is closed (unless your left hand had just previously happened to instinctively hit Command-S for the umpteenth time), you'd just revert back to a previous version when you actually want to. Which, I'm quite sure, happens a lot less often than having to answer that "Save this stuff, dear user?" prompt when closing of a document window...

Imagine what this would mean: no more data loss because you failed to hit Command-S in time before the power outage swept through your area; no more confirmation that, yes, you do want to save the changes to disk every single time you closing an app; no more RSI because you sub-consciously hit Command-S ten times for every five words you write.

A habit overhaul is due

Having to manually save documents is one of those computing habits that -- like quitting applications, and quite a few others -- we have gotten so used to that we don't question their usefulness anymore. And although a much more user friendly approach is technically feasible, we still stick with what we know, even though we don't know just why. It's time to change some of those habits, and why not start with how we tell our computers how to save documents?

Do you see other "habits" imposed on us by our computers that need a serious overhaul? Please join our discussion and let's talk 'em through!