Save Icon modernization needed

[Joseph Miller]

>
>
>
> Please also think about the use-cases where you *don't* want to save
> your changes.


Changes could always be saved.  On exit, ask if the person wants to *keep*
the changes.  They could be discarded if necessary.


>
> At work some documents are only used like a form: they get opened,
> filled out and printed. After that the document is closed again without
> saving the changes (so it's still empty at the next opening). I doubt
> those users would be happy that they need now to click several times
> "undo" to restore the document.
>

This should be treated as a separate *type* of document.  If we're changing
the way we think about it, we shouldn't do it halfway.  Perhaps a "form
interface" for filling out a form would be appropriate, but probably
different approaches for different apps anyways.


>
> And think also at the space-requirements for those "undo"s. Hard-disk
> space might be cheap today, but this data still needs to be loaded from
> disk (or even a network storage). And some operations might need much
> space for "undo"s, like in image-, video- or audio-editing.
>
Saves should still be in a versioning kind of system.  Most modern advanced
programs can keep "undo's" in their own file format internally, so the only
thing file-wise that needs to be done is keep different "versions."  A
version would be created at certain events.  If the file is left open all
the time (I do this when working on large spreadsheet projects for several
days) a new version is saved for each day.  Otherwise, a new version is
"committed" after closing the file.  This is basically just auto-save on
steroids, invisible to the user.

Programming wise, applications would keep telling the OS to add changes to
"file version" constantly.  The OS would decide when to actually write to
disk.  At some point, the application would request a "commit," which would
force a write to disk and logically separate as a new "version."  This
commit would be either at the events determined (once a day, after certain
types of changes) or whent he application closes.  If the app were to crash,
the OS would still have the uncommited changes, which would also have been
periodically written to the disk.
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