It's time we said goodbye to pressing ctrl+s

We’ve all been there: After an hour or two of work, our computer freezes, the software we were using crashes and all our hard work is lost. Sometime the applications go quickly, simply disappearing from our screen with, possibly, an apologetic little notice that tells us what we already knew: that we can kiss the our productivity goodbye as we try to recreate all the work we lost. Sometimes, however, they go slowly, falling into unresponsiveness, Macs taunting you with the Spinning Beach Ball of Death and PCs throwing up the Blue Screen of Death, both of them reminding you that you really should have hit ‘save’, ‘ctrl-S’, or ‘cmd-S’ at least twenty times in the last hour. The concept of having to “save” work is an anachronism. For years we’ve had autosave to do it for us, and I can see no reason why we should still have to think about when we save our work. Software should, to quote Nike, just do it. Indeed, much of the software that I rely on day-to-day does autosave. VooDooPad, a note-taking app for Mac, saves your work every time you click away, whether that’s to another page in the same application or to another app altogether. You can, of course, also click the save button, use ctrl-S/cmd-S, or select Save from the menu, but I’ve never found that necessary. [caption id=“attachment_172717” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The concept of having to “save” work is an anachronism. AFP”]  [/caption] Scrivener, my favourite writing app, doesn’t even have a save button, although it does respect the standard save hotkeys and has Save in its menu. Again, Scrivener autosaves your work and you can set it to do so after as little as one second of inactivity. Google Documents has gone a step further, not only getting rid of its save button but also the save menu item for text documents and spreadsheets. It does still make you save things like forms and presentations, but there’s a definite move away from the paradigm of saving. Autosave isn’t new, of course. In fact, it’s so old that neither VooDooPad nor Scrivener even list it as a feature on their website. The idea is now so outdated that the standard save icon depicts a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk, a once-ubiquitous storage medium that younger generations have probably never seen in real life. As the software and services I rely on have become more dependable, I stopped thinking so much about saving my work every few minutes. But recently I’ve had to get back into the habit of saving on a device that I never would have pegged as autosave averse: the iPad. As a journalist, blogger and author, I write a lot and I write often. As a consultant and conference attendee, I take a lot of notes. The iPad is one of the most convenient devices that I have for writing and taking notes when out and about or at meetings, yet several times I’ve lost work because of a lack of autosave. Although losing a blog post is annoying and losing edits on a document is frustrating, losing several hours’ worth of meeting notes can be a serious problem. Yet several apps have either crashed, taking my work down with them, or have simply not saved when I had thought they had. Office HD2, which in all other ways is a great word processing app that does exactly what I want, has lost meeting notes more than once, despite my best efforts to regularly save. Its app page now claims for the newest version that “Document saving now preserves 100% existing content fidelity”. Well, that’s just dandy now, isn’t it? Wordpress’ own iOS app ate my husband’s blog post last night, forcing him to rewrite an hour or so’s work. The app simply didn’t save his post when he switched focus to Safari. The iPad supports multitasking, so his work should have been safe in the app, but when he switched back to Wordpress it had gone. But the biscuit is comprehensively taken by Blogpress, another blogging app, which not only ate a blog post I’d written, but then refused to open at all. The bug was unfixable by users, requiring an update from the developer which took months to get through Apple’s app review process, according to Blogpress. I don’t know if Blogpress saved my blog post when it crashed, because I haven’t been able to open the app at all for three months. Autosave should be a default feature for every piece of software in which users create content, of any sort. Good developers have been doing this on desktop software for years and for many it’s such a minor thing that they don’t even tell you about it. It is rightly taken for granted that the user’s content is sacred and must not be lost. So why do we still have the save button at all? Is it not time to ditch this out-of-date, unnecessary bit of functionality? Apps and programs should save automatically on crash, change of focus or exit. It simply boggles the mind to think that we still have to click on silly little floppy disk icons to stop our work vanishing into the ether.