Friday, February 22, 2008

AutoSave Anyone?

(Reader Beware - Oncoming Rant)

With a snowy afternoon and a hot cup of tea I decided to make good use of my time and start a document I've put on hold for long enough. In an attempt to open my eyes to more than the Microsoft Office Suite, I started learning/using Pages (Part of the iWork '08). 

The initial keystrokes were hard enough just to get the thoughts flowing. I was able to get out of the mental rut and put down a few good paragraphs. Unexpectedly Pages crashed. No issue there, it should just restore my document...Right? 

Lets pause there for a moment to note a few things:
1. In the time that I've started this blog the automatic autosave in blogger.com has protected my work every minute, autosaving some 15 times.
2. TextEdit, a very basic word processing program has an autosave feature backing up SQL code I was messing with.
3. Time Machine on my MacBook Pro has backed up my system 12 times since the start of today.

In our world of computing backups, redundancy and autosaving, being able to recover has become common-law! So it was in disbelief that I re-opened my Pages file to find that NOTHING was recovered. There wasn't even an indication that it tried! Thats right...no autosave in Pages!

I won't drag on with any more rhetoric on the subject. This isn't a bash on Pages. Just a rant that the simple programmable things in life should never be forgotten. Autosave is one of them!

Command - S


1 comment:

pSw said...

Apparently, this is already known and detested by most users.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pages#Pages_and_Word

Also, a google search yields over 600 results for blogs, forums, and tech reviews with similar rants. It would appear that you can install an auto-save feature; but isn't that similar to upgrading to a prettier, more eco(nomic/logy)-friendly car, then being forced to install an air-bag?!?! Who'd ever think that MS would out think Apple? Maybe because MS has spent years attempting to make people "productive"...odd, indeed!