Jeff Carlson on Lion’s Duplicate Command

Jeff Carlson, last month:

And I will admit that, when working within a document, duplicating and then saving it later does make some conceptual sense. But why the delay between creating the duplicate and saving it to disk? Why doesn’t choosing Duplicate open the new window and automatically, quickly, let you choose how to save the document?

I think it’s because picking a file name and choosing a location in your folder hierarchy are chores. Better to let you procrastinate on these things than to force you to deal with them immediately — that’s my guess as to Apple’s thinking on this. In the pre-Auto Save world, it was dangerous to work on an as-yet-unsaved document, because a crash would destroy whatever work you’d done. That’s not a problem with Auto Save.

★ Tuesday, 29 November 2011