OS X Lion Brings Host Of Auto Save Features

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Apple is adding several auto-saving features to Lion, including Auto Save, Versions and Resume.

“Mac OS X Lion automatically saves your work — while you work — so you don’t have to,” says the company.

One of the most interesting implications is that you may never have to quit an application again, or go hunting for the file you were working on.


Auto Save
OS X Lion’s Auto Save automatically saves documents as your working on them — no more Command/S. And instead of making multiple copies, which eats up disk space, changes are saved in the working document. There’s also a lock feature, to prevent inadvertent changes, and “revert” feature, which reverts a document to the state it was in when i t was last opened — that means you can mess with it as much as you want, and it’ll open the way it was if the changes are a disaster.

Versions
Versions is like Time Machine for individual documents — it automatically saves document snapshots every hour while your working on it. It even looks like Time Machine: the current document cascades next to previous version. You can revert to a previous version, or just copy/paste chunks from earlier documents. “Versions records the evolution of a document as you create it,” Apple says.

Resume
OS X Lion’s “Resume” allows you to pick up where you left off after quitting an app or restarting the machine. Instead of saving all your work, shutting down all apps and reopening them when the machine boots up, Resume takes of all that, restoring the workspace to its previous state. Same with individual apps: whenever an app is closed, it reopens its files the way they were when the app was quit. “you never have to start from scratch again,” Apple says.

As a result, users behavior should change quite a bit. The rituals of working on a desktop machine — saving, quitting, relaunching applications and finding documents — will no longer apply.

Now if only the next version of Safari would automatically reopen all your tabs, Lion would be complete.

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