“Ask People to Save Only When Necessary

People should have confidence that their work is always preserved unless they explicitly cancel or delete it. If your application helps people create and edit documents, make sure they do not have to take an explicit save action.”

And also:

“Downplay File-Handling Operations

Although iPad applications can allow people to create and manipulate files and share them with a computer (when the device is docked), this does not mean that people should have a sense of the file system on iPad.”

The vast majority of writers and documents will rely on a “how was it when I last left it” system that is currently supported by a final explicit Save and close of the document. I think we completely agree there.

In fact, in an implicit Save model the software would Save the “last left it” AND the software could also look through the document’s History to recover the document at multiple points – in effect, doing multiple Save As commands all day long.

If the writer stops working on Monday and doesn’t pick it up again until Wednesday, our historical view of the “timeline” for the document can reflect that, and since it was a natural stopping point it’s likely that that will be an interesting moment in the History of the document. But the writer doesn’t have to create that Milestone, or that interesting moment. The software observes it, based on the writer’s behavior.

But there are those moments when the writer really wants to say “You know, this is an interesting point in my work on this document.” For example, he’s written the first draft of a report and wants to send it around to collect some comments. He needs to keep “draft1″ in a particular state so that he can go back to it and see where it was when he sent it around.

In both the implicit and explicit world, the right thing to do is to do a Save As (well, in the implicit save world this would be more like “make a copy”). There’s no need to build in an entire SCCS (Source Code Control System) into a document – writers today already readily understand the notion of doing a “Save as”. The new saved as document can copy over the history, but it no longer changes (unless of course the writer starts editing IT). Instead, the writer continues his work on his original document.

BUT in the Implicit Save system, the software can now note points where the writer does a Save As as a part of the History of the document he continues to work on.

An example would be useful. So the writer can see, through the History, that he was writing a document “report.doc” on Tuesday. He did a Save As command and made a copy of his work in “report-draft.doc”.

The writer could use History to “go back to the point where I did a Save As” and look at “report.doc” at that moment – which would, in effect, reconstruct the document at that state… or he could open “report-draft.doc” in the file system, assuming that it’s still there.

This history also shows other interesting moments where the writer did NOT do an explicit Save As. For example, if he worked continuously on the document all morning and then took a 2 hour break, it could mark that gap in time. If he picked it up again in the evening and worked for another hour, it could mark the time for that work as well. Now, in addition to the explicit Save As moment, the software has found other places that the writer might want to “jump back to”. Other interesting moments might occur when large amounts of information are deleted from or added to the document. There are many possibilities, none of which require the writer to do anything at all.

I guess that crux is that I agree that there are many interesting milestones, but I don’t think that we need to ask the user to explicitly identify them at all. We can spot the milestones for him, and he can use “Save As” to naturally create them.

In fact, in my experience as a writer I often fail to identify interesting milestones that have passed. I will find that I wish I had kept a copy of a document as it was a few days earlier when I shared it with a few people. Fortunately, I can use Time Machine to recover that information now, but I’d much rather have that built into the document.

As for collaboration, I haven’t forgotten about it at all… But I don’t see how any of this breaks down when you add another six authors, or even if you need to merge work from multiple sources.

And experimenting with it now, I see that it saves undos — you can close a document, reopen it and it remembers your undo history (though I have no idea how far back it goes).

This is a good first step, but unless this kind of functionality gets implemented in a similar way by all application makers, it could get confusing…

I think most people, most of the time _don’t_ use close-without-saving as a way of backing out of changes (though this is just my opinion). And once people realize that explicit save is no longer an option, they will adapt their behavior accordingly (e.g., use Undo instead).

One complication I can see is this: how does it work (and how _should_ it work) when multiple users collaborate on a document? Can I only see my own undo history? Or can others see it too? What happens when I type something that is then corrected by a collaborator? What happens when I click undo then?

Maybe we need to find a way to surface this information and to make it more transparent…

Save indicates that this is a point in the evolution of a work that possesses a degree of consistency, or is otherwise of interest. Perhaps it’s merely the last edit of the day — indeed, that indication is entirely redundant, as that can be deduced by inspection.

But it can also be the edit that marks the completion of a subtask, or a a milestone. These are the save actions worth saving. (“Save As…” also plays a role, allowing one to assign a name to a particular milepost.)

So the “hey, I don’t want to lose my work” aspect of Save can be lost, and good riddance. By doing so, yet retaining the option, we make the explicit intentional saves more valuable.

In programming, these correspond to checkins of the source code. And certain checkins are elevated,through “tagging”, to indicate a special status — perhaps a release, or perhaps merely to mark the begin and end of a largish task.

Likewise, text documents have their own milestones — this is the version I sent to Joe Collaborator for review, this is the version that Bill Boss signed his approval, this is the version that has the changes requested by Larry the Legal Eagle, to reflect the contract terms for this client. And this one is the one that went out as the proposal.

But there’s another aspect you’re entirely missing. The history of a document is not always linear. Sometimes, they branch. Sometimes, we may start from that version BEFORE Larry’s modifications, and rework it for another client.

This problem is well-known in software development, but it is something that business people also do all the time. The one document becomes many, but they share a history. And sometimes, changes in one need to be brought over to a “sibling” version of the document.

Currently, when we do Save As, the document forgets its history, and forgets its identity — its roots, if you will.

That’s not now Wave works, and it’s not how it should work for any document, in my opinion. Except when you explicitly want to strip all that away, as when offering a document for external use — turning in the homework, or submitting the bid, or publishing the final documentation.

But imagine the literary depths to be mined, were a great author’s edit history to be available. Not only could you instantly debunk most literary critics (who have rather an excess of bunk, as a rule) — you would have an instant creative writing class.

While it’s nice to see someone making an effort in this direction (especially Google, which is very influential), I wouldn’t say that this is a big leap forward. I don’t really believe that implicit save is going to be very well received by users without a new and thorough look at Undo and History. The problem is that implicit save CAN save things you don’t want kept. So the Undo system has to be very good at helping you to get back to wherever you want to be – even if it was yesterday.

And Google Wave has something very similar to the “scrubbing” that you suggest.

Another modern example that does this is Adobe’s Acrobat.com apps (e.g. Buzzword). They still have a save button there for those who want it for reassurance, but it’s not necessary to press it.