Upgrade to Lion

[Kay C Lan]

Hmmm,

All this seems to just confirm that we are old and set in our ways, not
that Apple is headed in the wrong direction.

It seems to remind me of the complaints about the introduction of automatic
chokes vs manual chokes; electronic ignition vs mechanical points; fuel
injection vs carburettors. Why would anyone want to have a screen, music
player, or PIM on their phone? Yet most people today who buy a car have no
idea what a choke is and certainly the rising generation have little clue
where the term 'dial a number' comes from.

As far as I can tell no 'Save' capability has been lost in Lion, just the
method to achieve the end.

Personally, Versions isn't perfect, in it's present format it would be nice
if when you 'Save a Version' you could name or tag the version for easier
retrieval, but hopefully future incarnations will fine tune and optimise
what hopefully will be for documents, what TimeMachine is for back-ups -
vastly superior than anything out there *for the vast majority of users*.

Igor, Mark,

I don't know where you got the information about Versions "taking up a lot
of storage space" if you have a lot of backups, but my understanding its
the complete opposite. Like TimeMachine, Version uses a db (unfortunately
the very slow SQLite) to track meta data to just keep copies of changes.

With TimeMachine, if you take a 6GB movie and move it to another folder,
TimeMachine, on a WiFi network TimeCapsule will take about 30 sec to mount
the volume, note that the actual movie file HASN'T changed, and simply
record the couple of bytes of data for the changed file path. Something
like Carbon Copy Cloner will go ahead and spend 30min actually making an
additional copy of the movie in a new folder in it's achieve folder, and
thereby pointlessly waste cpu, bandwidth, time and HD space.

Same with Versions. Currently everyone who 'Saves as…' is simply making a
complete copy of a document, when all they are going to do is change a
couple of KB of data. With Versions it chunks the data up and saves them in
an SQLite db and 'attempts' to logically chunk it up so that when you
change some data, it only has to make a copy of a small chunk of data. The
algorithm is not perfect, and has a long way to go, and it certainly suits
some document over others. ie, a document that is all text is hard to do,
but a document containing lots of pictures and text, if all you do is
change the odd caption, then Version saves will NOT save duplicates of the
pictures, just the chunks of text that have been changed - a huge saving
over multiple 'Save as…'.

The technique Apple uses is based on a research paper titled 'A
Low-Bandwidth File System' which may suggest where Versions is headed.
Imagine you have a large document, you do a Find and Replace of all British
spellings to American spellings. Currently to send both versions to a
publisher you'd have to send two large files; in the future hopefully we'll
be able to save bandwidth by sending just one, which also contains the few
KB of data so the publisher can view either version.

It's interesting, for a bunch of developers, isn't that exactly what you do
manually, instead of making a Mac version of an App, and Windows version,
and a French Version, and a Spanish version; you just make one App and
include the little extras of code that make the app appear as a completely
different version for different users.

This community is proportionally about as large as the Hot Rod community is
to the car owners of the world. I can't imagine too many of you are going
to head out soon and buy a car with a manual choke, mechanical points and
carburettors, or complain about the fact that you don't have the choice to
fit such to your next car.

The drivers of todays computers are more than happy that their computers do
most things behind their back without their input, knowledge or
understanding of how it works.

You're computer Hot Rodders, it's that simple. You prefer the old way.