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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   2450 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 19, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Windows 11 may have my least-favorite feature ever. Try this:

  • Open a file.
  • write some new stuff in it.
  • close the file.
  • reopen it.
  • confirm that the changes were kept.

Did you notice a missing step? I never said to save the changes, so the file was never updated. Instead, the changes were kept in a sort of suspended animation by the editor, and reappeared (in the editor only) when I reopened it.

There's actually a whole discussion around that. iOS popularized it, then Apple started including saving edits by default in some of their apps like Preview. They added a "create duplicate" menu item if you want to preserve the original. Designers live on their iPads, so it's been infecting other apps ever since.

The other change is how most web apps do "save edits automatically" now. Previously the standard was to present the user an empty form, let them fill in values, then create when they hit save.

Apple changed it to create an item (the item is actually created), then edit the item where your edits are saved by default. The big downside to this is that things get messy when a field has to be unique or it's expensive to update.

I've had many nightmare codebases where the designer wanted Apple style, the backend people wanted traditional style, and neither were willing to sit down and discus the differences.

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