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Is there now a generation of users who never worked with files?

blog.hyperknot.com

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Re: Is there now a generation of users who never worked with files?

#11

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

> The thing is, you can only offer this feature if your app's architecture is designed from the ground up to support it.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something, but this makes 0 sense to me. The Save button itself must be able to save the current state. So at the very, very least you should be able to just check on a schedule what the current state is and determine if it differs from the previously saved state.

There are much better ways to implement this that take more underlying work, but agree with the other comments, this has nothing to do with people not understanding files, it has to do with people expecting web editors to autosave.

Re: Is there now a generation of users who never worked with files?

#12

Post by donatj »

hyperknot wrote: post #10
donatj wrote: post #8

I don't understand why the author believes auto save would be so difficult to implement. Just automatically click the save button for the user on a one minute timer. Done. setInterval(() => { document.getElementById("save-button")?.click(); }, 60000);

Hi, author here. I think it's not a good idea to auto save just at random intervals. I certainly don't want my any of my apps to auto save without me telling it to do so. Maybe I'm old fashioned in this regards. Update, answered in detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42016231

Can I ask why? What is the harm in saving users work unexpectedly especially when I see a version history here?

I have been working with computers for 30 years, and I would find lack of a timed autosave surprising. Autosave was common on desktop applications in the mid 1990s. See: Everything in the MS Office suite.

Re: Is there now a generation of users who never worked with files?

#13

Post by flohofwoe »

crazygringo wrote: post #7

Nothing to do with generations. I simply expect a webapp to autosave. Period.

Manual save-points are still useful though if you want to go back to a previous version and branch off a different experiment.

Pretty much the same how (mostly PC-) games combine auto-save, manual quick-save and manual 'explicit' save (with a name chosen by the user), and where the last N auto- and quick-saves are preserved (where N is usually a fairly small number). It's less about not losing progress (for that, having only auto-save is fine), but being able to go back to a previous 'checkpoint' and branching off a new timeline.

Re: Is there now a generation of users who never worked with files?

#14

Post by brainwipe »

INTPenis wrote: post #9

I doubt it. Most school software still sends files over e-mail that you have to save as attachments, or upload your own document files. So they still learn that early, regardless of if they use it later in life.

Not the case universally. My son's school in south-central UK does everything via Google Docs or apps specially built for distance learning. If it weren't for Minecraft mods, he'd have no concept of the file system.

Re: Is there now a generation of users who never worked with files?

#15

Post by whstl »

gvx wrote: post #5

I work with files every day, and I'm not sure I would have realised I'd needed to save manually with the original MapHub UI either. A web-based interface that looks like that, I expect it to be transparent. If it'd had three icons (the classic blank page, open folder and floppy disk) in the top left, then I'd assume it would need manual saving. (I'm not saying that's what you need to do, just analysing my own intuiti…

I 100% agree. This has nothing to do with files, but rather with expectations of how web apps work.

Maybe current web apps implement auto-saving with bad feedback, sure, but this factor should be taken into consideration when building new web apps.

Re: Is there now a generation of users who never worked with files?

#16

Post by Brajeshwar »

hyperknot wrote: post #10
donatj wrote: post #8

I don't understand why the author believes auto save would be so difficult to implement. Just automatically click the save button for the user on a one minute timer. Done. setInterval(() => { document.getElementById("save-button")?.click(); }, 60000);

Hi, author here. I think it's not a good idea to auto save just at random intervals. I certainly don't want my any of my apps to auto save without me telling it to do so. Maybe I'm old fashioned in this regards. Update, answered in detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42016231

Unfortunately, the world now wants to be autosaved. One day, you might need to look at the usage pattern and AutoSave, perhaps when idle or after a set action is done (or fall back to the default timer). Otherwise, get a checkbox/radio that turns ON/OFF the options to "Autosave."

Re: Is there now a generation of users who never worked with files?

#17

Post by hyperknot »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #11

> The thing is, you can only offer this feature if your app's architecture is designed from the ground up to support it. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something, but this makes 0 sense to me. The Save button itself must be able to save the current state. So at the very, very least you should be able to just check on a schedule what the current state is and determine if it differs from the previously saved state. There…

The key is Undo-Redo information is lost. On Google Docs you can "time-travel" almost on a keystroke level, so that's when auto-save makes sense.

Update, answered in detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42016231

Re: Is there now a generation of users who never worked with files?

#18

Post by hyperknot »

gvx wrote: post #5

I work with files every day, and I'm not sure I would have realised I'd needed to save manually with the original MapHub UI either. A web-based interface that looks like that, I expect it to be transparent. If it'd had three icons (the classic blank page, open folder and floppy disk) in the top left, then I'd assume it would need manual saving. (I'm not saying that's what you need to do, just analysing my own intuiti…

The interesting bit is that for years this wasn't a problem. Like for 5 years I got 0 support requests about missing Save. Also web apps were not auto-saving traditionally, many of them still don't do it today.

Update, answered in detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42016231

Re: Is there now a generation of users who never worked with files?

#19

Post by michaelt »

donatj wrote: post #8

I don't understand why the author believes auto save would be so difficult to implement. Just automatically click the save button for the user on a one minute timer. Done. setInterval(() => { document.getElementById("save-button")?.click(); }, 60000);

Some traditionalist PC users use unsaved files as sort of temporary scratch space / undo buffer.

For example, imagine you've got a template for a presentation. You open the template, you add/edit as needed, then you save it with a new filename. You don't want it to autosave over the template.

Or you need to produce a cut-down version of an internal document to send to an external stakeholder, so you load the document, cut it down, then export-as-PDF. You don't want it to auto-save the deletions atop the original.

And of course traditional PC software didn't store a rewindable document history, and exiting the software discarded the undo buffer. So if the software auto-saved a cut-down version of the document over the original, the original was gone forever.

With autosave you've got to change your way of working, making the copy before you make the changes.

Re: Is there now a generation of users who never worked with files?

#20

Post by sshine »

hyperknot wrote: post #10
donatj wrote: post #8

I don't understand why the author believes auto save would be so difficult to implement. Just automatically click the save button for the user on a one minute timer. Done. setInterval(() => { document.getElementById("save-button")?.click(); }, 60000);

Hi, author here. I think it's not a good idea to auto save just at random intervals. I certainly don't want my any of my apps to auto save without me telling it to do so. Maybe I'm old fashioned in this regards. Update, answered in detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42016231

I expect web apps to auto-save because writing text in browsers is historically brittle, because browsers don't naturally persist the things you type into them anywhere. So if you don't create some layer of persistence, there is no natural point at which the user expectably saves things. Auto-save is just part of creating reliable, persisted data in web apps (regardless of whether that is local or remote) without expecting the user to do anything. There is no standard for manual saves to rely on, like there is for native applications that save to files.

So yes, you're old fashioned.

I still hit "Save" in every single offline or online app every time I've made a minimal change, because of old-timer PTSD reflexes: I used to edit files in vi over modem and telnet without screen (tmux), and if the connection had a hiccup, the connection died, my editor died, and the changes died with it. So saving (extremely) frequently was just a way to not lose your changes.

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