Tell me this has never happened to you…
The urge, the need to write grips you. You’re on deadline – carving words into Word
as fast as your brain can spew them through your fingers into pixelspace. It’s work stuff, or it’s an inspired blog
post, a kneejerk rant response to the latest Fox News inanity, or the latest
chapter in your boardroom-ripping blockbuster.
Forty-five minutes into the thing, you’re
switching back and forth between multiple browser sessions and your
fast-growing document – searching and springboarding off several threads of
contextually-interwoven inspiration and source material.
Then: BLOOIEE!!
Your machine just locked up.
An overheated wifi card, random operating system
flakiness, just one more gritty, rough-edged hole in the “perpetual beta”
cutting-edge browser you’ve been playing with, a virus arriving in your email
in the background – who knows.
Something’s b0rked, and it’s bringing everything
else down with it. “Elegant error handling” my eye.
It’s at about this point that you realise you
haven’t saved your magnum opus. Nor can you. This application has stopped responding.
Forty-five minutes – say 2000 words or so – gone. Forever.
Some of the most lucid, potent writing you’ve ever produced, and it’s gone.
Unrecoverable.
No? Never happened to you?
How about this then – you get a document draft
from a friend or co-worker in your email, asking for comments.
“Oh, I’ll comment alright,” you think. Opening the attached file right from the
email, you dig in and edit the living bejeezus out of that thing. And you’re a smart puppy – you know the
value of your crystalline nuggets of wordy wisdom – so you’re saving every few
minutes like a well-trained user should.
Finished, you click “Save”, then “Close”. Now –
where’s that file? Go on – just try to
find it again.
Oh – it’s all there, alright. All your precious work was saved – just not
in any obvious, easily findable place.
The document you opened was held as a temporary file, somewhere in the
dank catacombs of the operating system’s arcane file structure.
If you didn’t specify a folder for it, it’s as
good as gone.
In both of these situations, if you’re both:
a) a long time user with a deeper-than-average
understanding of what happens under the hood of your machine, and;
b) really bloody lucky;
...you might, just might be able to recover most of your work.
If you took the time earlier today to scatter the
right sacred herbs to the cardinal points, sacrificed enough small animals,
remembered to don your lucky underpants, and the stars are all perfectly
aligned – then maybe, once in a blue moon, you’ll be able to find that lost
file.
As for the rest of you ordinary, unlucky mortals –
you’re screwed.
You’ve just lost 45 minutes of high value work,
plus the time you spent realising what you’d done, trying to fix it, figuring
out just how really badly screwed you are, rebooting, searching for it again,
pounding your head against the keyboard.
How’s your blood pressure?
And these are just two simple examples of the many
ways things can go wrong, all because of a persistent block of stupidity sunk
deep into the structure of most file-based software applications.
Save.
What is
that anyway? Think about it. There’s
something so fundamentally broken about the whole idea of the “save” command.
We’ve got computers with processors capable of
doing 2 BILLION operations per second, and your word processor can’t be
bothered to properly store about 20k of text every once in a while. It’s a
design failure of the first order, resulting from a culture of “good enough”
thinking, and settling for what’s available.
There is no technological impediment, which caused
this loss. Even a humble DOS-based program can handle things like saving in a
background thread. We’re talking small amounts of text here, folks… why does this
crap continue to happen?
In our first example, above, you could blame the
user, perhaps. He didn’t happen to pick a file name BEFORE he knew what he was
writing.
Bad, bad user.
Bullshit.
It’s the application’s responsibility to
make sure it never loses the user’s work.
It’s the Operating System’s responsibility
to make sure it never loses the files entrusted to it by applications
and users.
It’s 2005.
If your hard drive goes crunch, you might well lose data. You should have a back up. Always.
But if a piece of software blows up your
data like this, well that’s a flat out failure to fulfill an obligation, of the
first order.
Requiring users to do “Save” is stupid.
It’s unnecessary, sloppy, a bad, outdated
paradigm. And it needs to die.
Two more clues:
Application software providers, for years, have
been feeding us the virtual office metaphor.
We have a “desktop”, “folders”, “documents”, a “trash can”.
OK – so let’s stretch the metaphor back the other
way.
Sit down at your desk and start a new document. No
– forget the computer; actually drag over a sheet of real paper and write. Make
sure you don’t put a title on the page, or a date, or your name. Try not to even think about the word “metadata”.
Keep writing.
Now – once you’ve chicken-scratched a page of
stuff, get back up from your desk and walk away. Switch off the lights. Leave
the room.
Or, no – go back into the room and, just for good
measure, give your desk a good hard kick. Jam your paper knife right through
the middle of that page you wrote.
Come back to the desk two hours later. Where’s
your document?
What? How can it be still on your desktop? And all
the words are still there, right up to the last period you wrote? Amazing!
Not so simple in the computer world, you think.
Harrumph!
Look at Gmail – the free web-only email system
from Google – as an example of the way things should work. We’re not giving special preference to
Google for any other reason than that it’s a useful example, by the way.
If you have a Gmail account, try this: click
“Compose” to start drafting a new message. Don’t type anything in the subject
line, and don’t put anyone’s email address in the “To” box – we’re going
metadata cold turkey here.
Type whatever you want for ten minutes or so.
Now – reach around to the big red switch on your
machine, and flip that sucker off. Go
on. Do it!
Switch it back on five minutes, five days from now
– log back into Gmail and go look in the “Drafts” folder. There that baby is!
At no point did you have to remember to save, supply
a file name, or figure out where to put your draft.
And that’s good. Because Save is stupid. And it
needs to die.
It’s just so… so… WordStar. So Ctrl-K-S. So CP/M.
So 1985.
Save is stupid. And it needs to die.