The "No Explicit Save" UI paradigm

[Bruno Medeiros via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On 07/08/2014 15:45, David Gileadi wrote:
> On 8/7/14, 4:18 AM, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>> This is an interesting behavior I've come across, even before watching
>> this talk: Recently I tried IntelliJ IDEA, and it also goes away with
>> any explicit UI notion of saving a file. It just saves files
>> automatically, as you type. This is interesting, and might well be a
>> marked improvement in UI behavior...
>
> This is a UI direction that Mac OSX is going in, presumably as part of
> their push to bring iOS behavior to the desktop. Apps that use it save
> as they go, and they have a standard UI to browse through previous
> versions of your document if you want to go back to (or crib from)
> something earlier.

Interesting.

Indeed the only potential issue I saw with this approach was, how does 
the application "mark" each local history version of a document? With 
explicit save it's easy, just create a new version in the local history 
each time the document is saved.
Without explicit save... A smart algorithm/heuristic would have to be 
put in place. Something like saving a new version after a user stops 
typing after a while (5min or so?), or after a significant number of 
changes occurred. (if the local history is smart enough and saves 
changes incrementally, it can actually store every single change actually)

In any case that's workable, and overall it seems like an improvement in 
UI design. It even reminds me of the talk "Inventing on Principle" talk 
Bret Victor gave ( http://vimeo.com/36579366 ), in particular the aspect 
about reducing (if not removing entirely) the save/compile/run cycle.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros
https://twitter.com/brunodomedeiros