Tempted to say “saveless documents” (like @alexmitchellmus suggests here), but that sounds like it could be a can of worms.
Added notes on implementation and opened for voting.
Would a save-less solution be that crazy? All it would entail is auto save every n-minutes, and save when closing project.
When a new project is started it simply places the untitled project in a default folder. We would still have save-as.
But whatever is easier to implement.
@alexmitchellmus and @jersmi, by “saveless” do you mean removing the ability to manually save? Is that something you regularly use in other apps? I know some people like the saveless approach and some really don’t.
Yeah, Jaymie, I was fuzzy on this – I’m not sure about Vuo conforming to Apple’s saveless documents vs. the future of Vuo as a cross-platform app. QC has it, and I have gone back and forth with it, turning it off sometimes. When I think of Apple’s saveless documents, I think of the pros/cons of the iOS model taking over.
by “saveless” do you mean removing the ability to manually save?
I would vote for a way to enable/disable the feature, and override it with Save/Save As.
Is that something you regularly use in other apps?
I absolutely love it in FCPX. I like the iCloud model, too (iWork, Notes, etc.). In other apps it can be awkward. For example, Logic Pro uses a slightly different method. TextEdit is awkward for me, as I’m used to using it “manually”. Preview is awkward for this reason, too.
So if we did “saveless”, we’d need the option to enable/disable it.
Apple holds a patent on saveless documents. So yeah, I’m not sure we could add the feature on Windows or Linux.
For implementing on Mac, looks like we’d have to significantly work around our cross-platform GUI framework (Qt) to access Apple’s saveless document support (Cocoa).
With that in mind, feel free to create a separate feature request for saveless documents if you’d like.
I would vote against autosave, except as an opt-in.
Managing exploratory edits knowing I have a saved version at a particular stage is engrained in my, and I imagine other peoples workflows.
2 Likes
I would definitely NOT want this to be enabled by default. Maybe something you can turn on if you would like this feature? There are so many times in a project were a new idea comes as I’m building and I try or experiment with an already working composition. It would be very frustrating to have my known working composition overwritten by one of my experiments. I much prefer to manually control which ideas make it to a saved file.
“Auto-save” as a menu item would be fine by me. Always nice to have some way to customize settings, i.e., how often / number of saves to keep / where to save backups, though I’d likely be happy with any “default” setup.
I’d also imagine that when the feature is on, an open comp would not get overwritten, cuz the point is to help (not hinder) productivity. Rather, there would be a designated backup folder with separate backup comp file(s) named “current filename_autosave_timestamp” or similar. Just a guess, I’ll leave it to Team Vuo.
I don’t want auto-save so much as a crash recovery folder where backups get saved automatically every m minutes for every file that is open. Most Adobe apps now have crash recovery and boy do they need it, Adobe has gone to the dogs on software reliability and QA!)
I just lost hours of work in Vuo yesterday I’ve realised reopening the files I was working on. I wasn’t using Vuo at all when my M1 Mac just went and restarted appro-pro of nothing at all. (I think it was actually crammed unified M1 memory, I was getting force quit warnings prior to crash).
When I’m in production mode in apps I use all the time I save a lot. I learnt the hard way. The digital passage of rights as I used to tell my students when they came to me crying about lost work.
I used to have a habit of saving before exporting to PDF or printing (because those things used to crash Macs so much in fast paced a DTP environment I worked in before the turn of the century!) But auto-save on macOS and backup crash recovery on Adobe and Autocad and MS has made me lazy these days.
I don’t really want having an auto save NOT OF THE CURRENT WORKING FILE (even if I can turn it off and on because I will not know whether to use it or not) but Inow desperately want a crash recovery file saved automatically. I think this the best way for programming domains. You don’t necessarily want autosaves when coding — at all — ever.
One nice thing about a crash recovery folder with the last n saves every file that is open saved as backups every m minutes is that even if you didn’t know this existed, if you have a bad loss of work, and you desperately consult the manual or the forums, you find your work was saved.
I didn’t lose too much work but some of the notes on the canvas had detailed info about my data sources which was worth more to me than the coding I lost in a way.
please add this feature request ASAP, it can’t be much coding to save backups to a default folder, I know Vuo has no preferences (much to my consternation years ago!) and this feature doesn’t require it to be added (thuogh ideally you could edit the back-up save time interval and folder location(s).
All pro apps have some form of backup recovery or autosave. most shareware apps have it too.
background:
strange I’m only asking for it now, I haven’t used Vuo for anything other than playing around on the weekend in years but I’m helping design the front end improvements for Mac version at least of the UI of app that is a nodal editor for economics modelling and I’m using Vuo ATM to do some of the tasks I can’t do in the other software yet b/c I haven’t learnt it well enough.
And also just to compare perspectives/paradigms of Vuo vs minsky in how data flows, how UI prompts are created etc etc. minsky is a free and open source dynamic systems modelling tool specifically design for economics/real world systems modelling with built in integral equations and differential calculus (flows and stocks in other words) and “godley tables” and it’s fascinating to compare the paradigms of Vuo and minsky and all the little decisions made about how they treat data objects etc etc. Lots of the UI features I requested in Vuo (keyboard shortcuts for lots of commonly used nodes for example) but didn’t make it are already in minsky so that is nice! having said that minsky is veryalpha/beta in the look of the UI.
TLDR ::
my +2 was not a vote for autosave, so much as for a crash recovery folder where backup files get saved for all open files every m minutes (set m =180 (seconds) in prefs, oh no prefs, set in .init file of Vuo or something).
I don’t care about the file extension of backup files, can be .vuo for all I care.
(but I’d take autosave that can be turned on/off over nothing at all — even though that leaves me in a dilemma about turning it on or off)
I don’t necessarily want Vuo to attempt to open crash recovery files automatically after a crash (like the Adobe apps and others do), I can manage that process manually just fine. just show me the backup folder.