Macworld Forums: What's new in Lion: Versions, Auto Save, and Resume - Macworld Forums

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"When you decide you want access to one of those older versions of a file, you can do so in two ways. First, you can open the File men and there choose to revert to either the last saved or last opened version of it."

That's cool that Lion has "File men" that will give you older versions of the file

Bremaria, on 20 July 2011 - 10:15 AM, said:

Whoops. Fixed, thanks!

I wouldn't say it's so dissimilar from classic version control systems like CVS or Subversion. The only real differences are that this is personal (not shared) and has the equivalent of automatic checkin.

Given that this stores deltas of deltas of deltas, only time will tell how reliable this will be IRL, but so far it looks great!

The ability to lock a specific version is a great idea; I've been "printing" documents to PDFs for years to accomplish essentially the same thing.

d00d, on 20 July 2011 - 10:57 AM, said:

And that it's designed for normal people and not just programmers.

LION MISSING ARROW BUTTONS IN SCROLLBARS

Lion has what is a fatal flaw to me. There are no arrow buttons in the scrollbars. Not even an option for them!

I am aware of all the other ways to scroll, so don't waste our time telling me about them.

When I am reading a web page, I want to to be able to click down one line at a time until the paragraph at the bottom is not cut off, then click in the scrollbar to go down a page. And repeat.

Scrolling with a scrollwheel or trackpad lacks the precision of clicking the arrow button or clicking in the scrollbar to go down a page. It is to easy to undershoot or overshoot exactly where I want to go which is one line down at a time. This means is takes longer to do scrolling than clicking the arrow button.

I also know you can go down one line at a time with the arrow keys, but this requires taking my hand off the mouse which also takes longer and is extremely annoying.

Not having arrow buttons in the scrollbar is intolerable! I use them constantly, and if I can't scroll windows then I can't use the computer. So this makes any improvements that Lion may have worthless.

John__B, on 20 July 2011 - 11:26 AM, said:

And they achieved that by creating versions aggressively and putting a slightly nicer GUI on it (some of the more refined GUIs for SVN/Git are actually really easy).

CharlesKensingtonu1qo, on 20 July 2011 - 02:52 PM, said:

Dude... You're doing things OLD SCHOOL! For a page at a time, you simply hit the space bar. To go up a page at a time, you hit shift + space bar. If you insist on using a "mouse" for speed, may I suggest a magic trackpad? It's the cat's meow for web surfing. Same functions as a current laptop trackpad. - Two finger scrolling is the B O M B. You may also want to consider a mouse with a scroll wheel. Again, superior to using the a scrollbar. Or better yet, get a programmable mouse that will allow you to customize your scrolling / page up / page down settings with other buttons. All of these suggestions are faster and easier than using a scrollbar. I saw your comments about precision and really disagree. I feel the magic trackpad is far more precision than the "system" you're using. It's time to get with the times. A little change can go a long way. And I'll be after a week or two, you'll over-write your old habits and be thankful you did.

CharlesKensingtonu1qo, on 20 July 2011 - 02:52 PM, said:

You've already posted this in other places, and now you're posting it again. It's potentially off topic for this article.

If you customize your scroll wheel software you may be able to get exactly one line, and if you use the arrow keys it will be exactly one line. Given the alternatives, most of us hate the scroll arrows now and don't miss them. Sorry.

Everything old is new again..

In 1985 it was

DIR

CALCULATE.FOR;9
CALCULATE.FOR;8
CALCULATE.FOR;7
CALCULATE.FOR;6
CALCULATE.FOR;5
CALCULATE.FOR;4
CALCULATE.FOR;3

Ken Olsen: Beauty of Unix is its simple. The beauty of VAX/VMS is its All There..
Hmm..

The optional auto save is a bit of a nerve wracking one. I suspect a lot of people will simply keep hammering cmd+s until it's absolutely taken for granted.

("space permits," Apple says) But where does "local" TM throw in the towel? 75% of capacity? 80%? It's nifty but as someone who generates data and pushes it to a networked store, I df-h and watch that Capacity column a lot... (At least it's my stuff it's hanging onto, not like Tivo taping crap shows that I wouldn't watch if you held a gun to my head "as space permits")

This post has been edited by bcapehart: 21 July 2011 - 04:30 AM

Does anyone at Apple work in the real world? Features like this make me wonder:

"Whenever you make significant changes to your document, Versions takes note of it. What’s a significant change? Pretty much anything, it turns out, from deleting a paragraph to adding a new line of text or inserting a picture."

Does anyone there realize that wading through hundreds of petty changes like that to find that deleted paragraph is more trouble than just typing it again? Some new specs committee must have come up with that one of a Friday afternoon when everyone was eager to leave.

Versioning done right is like snapshots in Scrivener. Users chose to save a snapshot before they begin to make major changes. And users can name the change, so finding a prior version is easy.

Is there a way to delete some of the intermediate versions, the ones I am certain I will not need any more, or indeed the entire earlier versions of a file that has "stabilized" into its final version?

I am using a MBP with only about 18.59 % remaining free space. If "versions" starts gobbling this up... (I know it only saves "deltas," but it does add up...)