Inspirational Technology

Death to the Manual Save

OK, I'm going to rant a little. This is aimed at people developing software for Mac OS X. Will you please quit making people manually save. Manual saving sucks, let me say that again it SUCKS! It's an artifact of the computer that has been passed through to the user and that's something that needs to stop. Computers are bad enough without having to remember to save your damn work all the time. There's no reason for it anymore, so quit doing it already. Yes I know it's more work for the developer, but Mac OS X is about usability and developers should be striving to make the computer more humane. Manually saving files is not humane. Yes I also know it will take people time to get used to not having to manually save, but I promise they'll be happier for it, really I promise. People have just been conditioned to manually save because of how crappy all the past software has been. On Mac OS X this can change, it's time for the manual save to die.

I just downloaded what I thought looked like a cool piece of software aimed at writers called Ulysses. I'm trying to write more and was excited to see what looked like software focused around writing and not the computer. It has a project metaphor where you create documents within a project and keep stuff together in a nice bundle. Well guess what? Not only does Ulysses make you manually save your files, it makes you save both your documents and your projects. When you create a document you have to save it to the project and then you have to save the project. NO, NO, NO, NOOOOOOO!! WHY! God how stupid. Just save the god damn thing for me. I HATE saving stuff manually, HATE IT, HATE IT, HATE IT! To be fair Ulysses is 1.0 and very well might turn out to be pretty cool, but I guarantee I won't be using it until it can save itself.

Another example is Spring, I use this to keep track of the music I want to download from eMusic. I never, never remember to save this thing. In fact I've become so annoyed that it can't save itself I've actually stopped using it. I've complained to Robb about this and he'll fix it eventually, but having to manually save in Spring is like having to manually save in the Finder. What's that you say? Oh you don't manually save in the Finder, ah yes exactly.

One more example, one of my favorite pieces of software is NetNewsWire Pro, in fact I'm using it to write this post. But, umm, well if the power were to go out or my computer were to crash in some manner I'd lose everything I've written so far because I have to manually click on "Save as Draft". Why? Why doesn't it just work like mail where all new messages are saved as drafts? The problem is that when you click "Save as Draft" it clears the compose window and you then have to go track down your message in the drafts folder. So that provides discouragement for saving a draft. Really the button should be titled "Save as Draft and Start a New Message". Of course that's never what I've wanted to do when clicking on "Save as Draft", but oh well. It's also quite jarring to click on "Save as Draft" and instantly have your post disappear. I know I'd rather manage a little draft clutter then to ever lose any work. I'll give NetNewsWire credit though, it does auto save once you click the Save as Draft button and then continue editing, after you've actually found your post in the drafts folder of course. BTW, did I mention NetNewsWire is one of my favorite pieces of software, it's just the "Save as Draft" function that has a pretty poor user experience.

Just image how much iTunes would suck if you had to save it every time you moved a song to a playlist, or in iPhoto having to save every time you added a picture, or in iCal every time you added an appointment. Are the functions of these applications really any different then what Ulysses, Spring, NetNewsWire Pro and "insert you favorite app" do?

Death to the Manual Save! Death to the Manual Save!