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My biggest problem is that Apple is not explaining these changes.

With the original Save/Save As, the concept was easy to understand after someone took 30 sec to explain it to you. You knew exactly what was happening.

But with Apple's new changes, Apple has made autosave and versions the new paradigm (awesome), but they've done a terrible job at explaining how to do anything but that.

How do I edit something and then save that edit as a new document without affecting the original? If I copy a file, does the whole version history get copied too? What if I send it to someone? What if I want to delete the version history period? What if I want to "duplicate" a file but not save it anywhere, because I just want to mess around with changes for a while?

I've been using Lion since it came out, and I don't really know the correct answers to any of those questions.

The version history is stored by the file system and not by the file itself. If you copy the document you don't store any of the version history and you can't revert (from my experience).

Also, if you send the file to someone they get the latest changes, they don't get any history... the history is snapshots made by the OS much like Time Machine does for backups, except it is done every so often automatically (auto save) and not to an external drive.

The only real cock-up is the Save As. Save As should save the new file, and revert the old file back to what it originally was (the last time I explicitly saved, not the spot that auto save last saved).

If you want to modify a copy of the file, before you start your modifications you simply choose File -> Duplicate and it opens the same document but with a different name. When you save that one it will have an entirely new history associated with it.

The fact that it is a file system feature that is baked into the OS means that all apps can take advantage of it if they want and the overhead is small. It also means that apps no longer need to keep notes about what modifications were done to what, instead being able to rely on the auto save feature. The other nice thing is that since it is not part of the document and is outside of it, data leakage is much less of an issue than with other file formats such as Microsoft Word where recovering previous text is rather simple and can lead to data leaking that you wouldn't want leaking.

Yeah, I noticed this one too, when cropping a picture and saving it as a new file (in Preview). Both the original and the new one were cropped. A moment of panic later, and I found the revert option in Preview, but only because I knew it existed.

Totally. 100%. Undesirable. I did not Save. I saved to a new file. The only option now appears to be duplicating before editing (bad) or hoping the application has an 'export' option which sidesteps this (also bad - export typically presents far more options than save-as).

> duplicating before editing (bad)

Why is this bad?

edit: Why are people downvoting me for asking this question? I'm genuinely curious.

This behavior wasn't really introduced with "Save as..." in ML. In Lion, if you rotate a page in the middle of a PDF, then quit and reopen the file hoping to undo the rotate, it will still be rotated. Fortunately, it was someone else's presentation where I first saw this.

Anyhow, ML isn't doing a "save" and "save as..." now; it had already done the "save" part. Apple really should do a better job explaining this, but it's most likely not consistent across all apps. Does XCode even do this now?

It reminds me of the preferences behavior where you make your changes and that's it, rather than requiring you to hit an "OK" or "Apply" button as in Windows.

Or how about this one: you're editing an existing document and you wish to preserve the original by using "Save As" to create a duplicate when you finish editing, except at some point you hit "Command S" by accident or by reflex and you've now clobbered your original, without warning, and there's no previous version to restore.

That one's been around for 28 years, and was finally fixed in Lion and Mountain Lion.

The "Save As" command has always been dangerous and ridiculous in the way it's typically used for editing and then saving duplicates. Lion finally gives you better and more safer options, but if you're not willing to learn what those are and how it works, if you're hell bent on continuting to do it the old way, then you're not going to like it and you're going to continue to risk data loss like you have for the last 30 years.

I, for one, love the way it works. Yes, I had to sligtly change my workflow but it's change absolutely for the better.

I'm confused. All it does is make the "bad" behavior the default, but give you the option to revert it if the original file exists somewhere on disk? That's an improvement?

Versioning (and allowing reverts) is awesome, but changing a decades-old idiom to something that suddenly destroys data is...well, scary, to say the least.

Edit: Someone further down the thread suggested that the function be renamed to "Duplicate and Save". That would totally fix the problem - this is a new interaction mechanism, totally different from what we've all been training on for the last thirty years, and it needs a new name. The feature itself is fine, but hijacking an existing operation's name for it is not cool. It violates the principle of least surprise.

I agree that using the Save As command is not a good method for modifying files. However, the correct syntax for this modified should be "Save & Save As."

Here is an analogy one could one make to the current implementation -- you request to be billed later, but instead the full amount is deducted from your bank account now, and you are also sent another bill in the mail a week later, which you pay because you didn't know you already paid for it.

Something makes me think that there are a lot of giant egos at Apple now, making eccentric decisions, and Steve Jobs isn't around to tell them they are stupid.

Or you can hit 'undo'. That's been around about as long as well. And since there's no file dialog, you're aware something is different, and the application is still up and running so you can make changes.
What Apple has done is changed "save as", into "fork a branch". This is progress, mostly.

The real end goal here is for Apple to somehow figure out a way for the average person to have the power of modern version control while still understanding it. This is a good goal, and we should laude Apple for it.

It should be noted that Google Docs also has no Save As. It does have "Make a Copy".
I completely agree. A split second of poor judgement can destroy hours of work. In this case I'm happy to let Apple save me from myself.
Well, it seems it's been made even more dangerous. Why not remove it, re-label it?
Seems like there would be a better way to save the user from their occasional accidental "Cmd S" than by upending a core expectation of computer behavior since time immemorial. Why not allow the "revert" option when you hit "Cmd S"? Seems like you could keep all the same core functionality and just have a right-click accessible history of every file on disk. Is there an advantage the new system has over that?
I can't see why we can't have it both ways.
There's actually a very simple solution to this problem: "Save As" before you make any changes at all. Only then, in the new version, start to make your changes. Problem solved.
Pardon my rudeness here but who the hell are you to make a proclamation that "Save As" has always been "dangerous and ridiculous". Did you try that in every major workflow, like mine?

Let me give one example - I sometimes want to read the content of the file (inside its own app), maybe make some changes and then Save As a new version. I do this mostly in MS Word (for Mac and thankfully they haven't gotten rid of Save As yet). We keep different version in different files, especially for our team. Updating the original file by default is simply stupid in my case.

Oh man, that is seriously broken. I save-as in Preview all the time when cropping or color-adjusting photos, and this could've produced a very bad day if I had upgraded to Mountain Lion and kept doing that, unwittingly overwriting all my originals. (I haven't upgraded yet, partly to let things like this be come to light before I dive in.)
It doesn't overwrite all your originals because files are versioned in Mountain Lion. If you accidentally save changes to your original that you don't want, you can just revert to a previous version.

I used to do what you describe--open the original, make changes, then Save As. Until I accidentally hit Save instead of Save As. Goodbye original.

Now when I want to work off an original I make a copy of it first in the filesystem, then open the copy with the application (Photoshop usually). Since I never open the original with the app, I can't screw it up. I don't have Mountain Lion yet but the "Duplicate" functionality sounds like it will work for me.

I highly doubt this will be fixed in any of the future 10.8.x updates.
In Lion, Apple changed the File model completely (everything is saved automatically by default. you no longer have any "in-flight" changes that aren't saved), but they haven't properly educated the users, causing people to assume it's "broken".

With the new model, if you want to edit a copy of a file instead of the original file, you need to Duplicate first. I've been bit by this a few times as well, since it's hard to break 20 years of habit, but from an outside perspective I think the new model is less technical and could be more intuitive to new users (real life has no equivalent to "unsaved changes").

"With the new model, if you want to edit a copy of a file instead of the original file, you need to Duplicate first. "

And this is why I think it's broken. There are times when I don't know ahead of time if I want to keep the edits in the document I've worked on, or 'fork' it and give it a completely separate name. Making me decide up front is forcing me to do more of the work instead of the computer, which is not how it should be.

I will probably bite the bullet and upgrade to ML this year - still on Snow Leopard right now, because I really don't like these sorts of mental model changes.

Indeed, real life has no equivalent to "unsaved changes". And it sucks.

Thats why a smart entrepeneur developed the eraser.

Versions has been the single "feature" preventing me from upgrading to Lion, and it makes me sad that things haven't gotten any better in Mountain Lion.

I want to be in control of what I save, when I save it and IF I want to save it.

Versions would be a nice feature if they worked as a background safeguard and not as the main way of persisting changes. Many times I open files to try stuff out, and I DO NOT want anything saved. With images, I end up doing this much more often than actually making changes I want to keep.

I think this whole feature is a sure way of losing data. Have they fixed how versions work with non-HFS+ filesystems yet? The last time I checked, no versions were saved in this case, but the system kept persisting your changes immediately: you edit a photo, make some changes, decide you don't want them and... too late, no way to revert to your original version.

Like someone else already mentioned in another comment, I'm about this close of installing Windows 7 in both my Macs. This is no way for a proper OS to behave and this whole "this is the way of the future, just keep up with the program" blind fanboyism is making me sick.

I honestly don't see why people are so upset. I think the way saving is implemented in MLion is fantastic. Instead of relying on old standards, the engineers are looking ahead of the time.

"Normal", non-tech people who aren't obsessed with technology, will find this feature amazing. Actually, let me correct myself - they won't notice this feature, and that's the key.

Save As was a hack, which worked for people who knew about it, but was a total clusterflack for normal users. Normal users rarely revert to old copies and if you really want a duplicate of a file, well, you can always have a "duplicate", which is an available feature.

Using the OSX in this way will be a more pleasant experience, going forward. I am not saying this because I love Apple's design, I am saying this because I've seen this countless times while helping my family with their computer issues.

I cannot believe how the Apple engineers implemented this feature, thinking this makes sense???

  switch (menuEvent) {
    case FILE_SAVE_AS:
       NSString *newFileName = prompt_for_saveas_name();
       [document writeToFile:originalFileName];
       [document writeToFile:newFileName];
?!?
They should add a third (or fourth?) option: "Move changes since last opening to a duplicated file and revert this file"

It's long and would look ugly, so they'll never implement it. But they should.

(I'm not a pro git user, and don't use `stash`, but I think what I described is like `stash`ing changes, checking out into a new branch, `stash pop` and then `commit`ing...)

I think we're all conflating "worst case" with "common case" of Save As and Duplicate.

In the worst case, the traditional filesystem behavior could lose your data if you accidentally hit "Save" instead of "Save As". In the common case, it let you save off new versions without affecting your existing version.

The (Mountain) Lion paradigm removes the worst case; you can always revert and recover. But the behavior of the common case gives the appearance of lost data, and violates both Principle Of Least Surprise and Do What I Mean.

I am trying to resist the urge to call Mountain Lion "Mountain 'O crap"

If Microsoft did this they'd be eviscerated crucified.

iOS Developer and Mac user here (as well as Windows).

The madness must stop. I have a feeling Steve will be missed more and more as the years pass.

Based on how everything else works it would be simple enough for the "Save As" to basically "Duplicate and Save." You press it, give it a file name and you how have two windows. Don't know why Apple didn't do it this way.
The big question here is data loss, which the article alleges but does not really prove. The author basically says "I don't understand versions, so I don't trust them."

Many folks have pointed out that since Mountain Lion auto-saves all file versions, there actually is not any data loss. Just revert the file.

However, my reading of the Apple support document [1] is that versions are discarded over time. It says:

> OS X Lion manages the version history of a document, keeping hourly versions for a day, daily versions for a month, and weekly versions for all previous months.

This would seem to indicate that if you downloaded a file from your camera, then made changes that were autosaved to the original file, the original version would be discarded after 24 hours had passed--the several "hourly" versions reduced to a single "daily" version.

If that is true, it is really problematic. If version control software is to be trusted, I think it should not discard versions.

[1] http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4753

That's insane; it must be a bug. Perhaps they should just stick with the new document model. We'd have to relearn, but a clean break is better than this nonsense.
I dislike auto-versioning as I have no control over the process or even an understanding of the space used

In this era of cheap terabyte-scale storage, concern about the space used for versions of a document is NOT something that should occupy your mind.

Mountain Lion made me greatful for bootcamp. I've resolved to use my Mac Mini as a Win 7 machine from here on out.
Is "duplicate, then save" common sense enough?
Looks like it's not just SaaS that is susceptible to major feature disruption.
If Steve were here, he'd say "Just Save Your Files Differently."
This really messes with the way I work with images. I'll open base prototypes and start playing with changes not knowing at that point if I'll want to save them or not. If I end up keeping them, at that point I'd save as a new file. Seems like auto-save should be app level preferences that should be able to be turned off. I don't want to duplicate a file every time I want to do some experimentation!
For the layman I understand this kind of functionality. But as a creative who is constantly saving multiple modified files for clients, this is awful. I'm assuming/hoping Adobe will not integrate this 'feature'.

Apple should have at least changed the semantics. The term 'Save as' is understood by the majority of users to be what it has been for the last couple of decades.

It looks like others have found a work-around by leveraging the duplicate feature another other keyboard shortcuts but this it quite annoying.

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-57481986-263/apple-retu...

The workflow I've always used:

   Open file > Save with new filename > Change new file > Save changes
10.7/10.8 just removes the last step. The only people having issues are those that confuse the middle two steps.

Or, in unix parlance, you cp then vi. Not the other way around.

defaults write -g ApplePersistence -bool no

Problem solved.

Isn't this what Time Machine (or git, or svn, or cvs) is for?
"Save as" overwrites the original file as well like "Save" does? OMGWTF
good
Unfuckingbelievable - which einstein inside one infinite loop came up with this gem?
welcome to osx the only thing osx has over other platforms is the ease to create good looking gui applications. i do miss it every now and then. but not really that often.