With Lion, autosaving is the norm and is very much encouraged, and those programs that don’t do it at the moment will no doubt start moving over to that model over the next year or two.
That’s by-the-by, though. Scrivener was designed to have autosave from the beginning - as its designer, it’s something I wanted. And over the past five years, the overwhelming feedback from our tens of thousands of users has been that they love the security of autosave and how it works. I understand that your proposal would still incorporate an auto-save of sorts, but changing the saving mechanism when we have so many users who rely on, and like, the current implementation would not be a good move for us at all. I can count on one hand (including this thread) how many users have disliked autosave over the years.
This is me saying that it won’t change and that I have no intention of altering the philosophy of the program. And most users do like it this way, and while that is not a reason not to “improve” it, I disagree that your proposal would be an improvement, either for myself or most of our users. Which isn’t to dismiss your proposal - it certainly has its merits and I can understand why you might like something like that, but I wouldn’t want to “lead you on” and give you the impression that this is something that might be implemented. I can certainly understand that a “Revert” feature would be useful - and in all fairness this is something that most auto-saving programs do have, which Scrivener does not. Ioa, however (who knows what he’s talking about), is right that the saving mechanism is very closely tied to everything else. Reverting to an earlier version of a single text is one thing; reverting the whole binder, when there may be texts created since which are now orphaned along with many other potential issues, is a problem on a whole different scale.
I do appreciate the feedback, though, and the thought you have put into it.
As I promised, if the “boss” has no intention to change his philosophy, and he says so himself, then I’ll just shut up
I would also like to say that, even though I don’t agree with some things he says, he was the first, ever since I started to post about this idea of mine, who really wanted to understand what I was saying, and did understand, and even recognised some merit in it. For that, I thank him.
That possibly future “Revert” idea sounds good too, if one can beforehand decide on the precise state(s) for eventual reversion – I suppose backups would be used for that, automating that long-winded process I described in the previous post.
Anyway, as they say, keep up the (very) good work on Scrivener.
Thanks for the kind words! I think the state for reversion would be the last manual save - that’s how it normally works with autosave and revert in other programs. As I say, it’s a tough one because of how the code works at the moment, especially with the binder, but I definitely could see a “Revert” as being useful in the future.
Hey, it seems to me that, each through his own philosophy, we sometimes want the same thing. I, the old skool type, getting on a bit and grouchy, you, the advocat of a new era in personal computing, you and I often just want to get our hard fought, “good” work back, that which we wrote before we had that one nightcap too many (so it was not my fictional daughter’s fault, after all ;-), then had that really, really stupid idea which would ruin our novel –- clever as the whole notion seemed at the time --, but sobered up before hitting “Save” one more (and fatal) time. Ha! ha!
And most users do like it this way, and while that is not a reason not to “improve” it, I disagree that your proposal would be an improvement, either for myself or most of our users. Which isn’t to dismiss your proposal - it certainly has its merits and I can understand why you might like something like that, but I wouldn’t want to “lead you on” and give you the impression that this is something that might be implemented. I can certainly understand that a “Revert” feature would be useful - and in all fairness this is something that most auto-saving programs do have, which Scrivener does not. Ioa, however (who knows what he’s talking about), is right that the saving mechanism is very closely tied to everything else. Reverting to an earlier version of a single text is one thing; reverting the whole binder, when there may be texts created since which are now orphaned along with many other potential issues, is a problem on a whole different scale.