In this modern computing era, some things just never seem to change. You would think that as hardware and software progress, so too would their basic given features. Take auto-save for example, the wonderful invention which has saved many a weary-eyed author. It so beautifully saves your document every ten (or two, or twenty) minutes.
But it is so outdated. With the power of modern hardware, where most computers (Macs) utilize dual cores, I will propose an auto-save 2.0. Why can’t an application monitor my usage of the program, and automatically save my document when it detects my attention has been diverted elsewhere?
Just yesterday I lost 25 minutes of work because my battery died. When switching out the battery, I pulled it too soon, before the computer had saved the memory contents to hard disk. This obviously caused the computer to shutdown. My fault? Of course. But could software have helped? Of course.
Modern computing is multi-tasking. Take this instant for example. I am writing this blog entry, chatting on iChat, editing photos in iPhoto, updating my blog in iWeb, monitoring email, surfing the web, and editing a Word document. Ideally, when I switch from iWeb to my blog editor, iWeb would recognize this, and take that moment in time to auto-save. That way, if my computer suddenly crashes, I’m not up the creek without a document.
To be honest with you, I write this post surprised. Why hasn’t Apple employed technology like this in its iLife/iWork/Mac OS applications? It seems so simple, would avert so much stress, and requires practically no additional coding. I’m expecting to see Auto-save 2.0 in Leopard, Apple. Now get your move on.
This would not be too hard to implement as a system-wide utility.
Just look for task switches, make sure the user doesn't switch back for n minutes, and then send a fake command-S keystroke to the app. You could exclude apps in a UI and poof, you're done.
I don't want to write it myself so consider the idea public domain. :)
On the other hand, if the computer does too much on behalf of the user, it may do things which the user didn't want (like saving changes to a document which shouldn't have been saved).
I switched from Apple Mail to Entourage a while back, and the all too numerous dialogs ("Are you sure?") are driving me to distraction. I already lost one folder of e-mail messages - in Mail I at least had the undo command available, but not in Entourage. Goodbye, messages.
gmail does this... if you pause in your typing, it autosaves your draft.