I was teaching my Desktop Publishing class last night - students all busy creating ads using InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator…suddenly (maybe due to the high winds) the power went out for about a minute.
I haven’t heard a collective moan and groan and loudly muttered swear words like that in a long time - (and 15 minutes prior, I had suggested people continue to save their work as they go along). A few of them lost everything they had been working on for the past hour.
I think I no longer need to impress upon that class the value of saving your work often.
When I did tech support you wouldn’t believe the calls I would get. Usually a million-dollar proposal was starting in 10 minutes, and the user had spent the past 3 days working on a document for it, when Word crashed. Without fail, when I asked them when the last time they saved it was, they’d go into a tirade about how Word is unstable, and if it were more stable, things like this wouldn’t happen.
Back when a friend of mine was a total computer noob (and frankly, I have no idea how far she’s progressed, but she’s definitely not the techie type), she somehow got the idea that saving a file works like this: Open blank file, give it a name, start typing, close file. So in her mind, the computer just saves every change she makes.
You can see it coming. She lost an entire research paper, maybe 10-15 pages. Called me up in a panic. I tried everything I could think of, thinking maybe she’d accidentally saved at some point, or autosave was on, or something. Nope. Gone.
That was a hard lesson, but I think it was well learned. And after she stopped crying and calmed down, she admitted that since it was fresh in her mind and she still had all her notes, she could probably re-create a fairly close facsimile.
When I was in fourth grade – this would be 1986 or so – my school’s “computer lab” was, seemingly, a converted closet. Veeeeeeeeeery cramped.
One day we were all in there typing up reports. Mine was on manatees. I’d typed four pages, which was a lot for me back then! Suddenly all the computers went down. It turned out that somebody had stepped on the master power switch for them all! Don’t ask me why they had them hooked up that way, but computers in schools were still pretty new at that point. We’re talking Apple IIEs here. I think a couple of them had – gasp! – color monitors!
To be fair, this is the way things should be. And it makes for a much better interface and is far more intuitive that “saving” a file. I should be able to open up Word, choose from a list files that I’ve been working on (or a new one), edit it, and close Word. Why should a typical user care what a file is, or how to save, and all that blahness?
Yeah, I know, it gets a little more complicated when sharing files and so forth, but really, it’s not a problem that can’t be solved. Hell, I have this fantastic note-taking app for the Mac called xPad that already does that. No saving, no files.