Posts Tagged ‘onenote’
Why saving documents is bad…
I’ve never liked having to ’save’ documents on a computer – I think it’s bad design.
In the real world you write on a piece of paper; and then you have something tangible. To introduce the paradigm that you then have to save the work you’ve done was something introduced by computer systems, and has carried through since. A much better paradigm is to have everything you enter into a document for example, or everything you edit on a photo to be automatically saved. Of course saving a copy is fine as you can save a copy with new changes. The power of computers can be used to ‘turn back time’ to a previous version of an item, even before some destructive changes.
A few tools use this paradigm, such as Aperture or OneNote – just to pick two at random. Whatever you do to an image in Aperture is what happens to the image. You don’t have to edit, then save. Similarly, you can type something into OneNote, and close it immediately – what you’ve typed is automatically saved. Should you want to ’save’ a document, you should be able to ‘file’ it, which is the way I’d prefer to work.
To paraphrase a comment from my father when I suggested he tried using Linux instead of Windows on his next upgrade: “…but I like Windows – it’s taken me ages to learn”.
Bad design establishes new patterns of work, and human beings – being the adaptable creatures we are – learn to adapt and live with things. This isn’t to say that bad design is acceptable. After my dad started using Linux, he found it much more intuitive for him, and liked it. “Seems to be doing what I want” was his reply when I asked him. Of course the argument isn’t that Windows is bad and GNOME Desktop is good. Of course there are bad designs on many systems.
It’s important to challenge things, and ask *why* am I doing it this way. Is it because it’s the way it’s ‘always been done’, or can I do something different…
