Versioning (and allowing reverts) is awesome, but changing a decades-old idiom to something that suddenly destroys data is...well, scary, to say the least.

Edit: Someone further down the thread suggested that the function be renamed to "Duplicate and Save". That would totally fix the problem - this is a new interaction mechanism, totally different from what we've all been training on for the last thirty years, and it needs a new name. The feature itself is fine, but hijacking an existing operation's name for it is not cool. It violates the principle of least surprise.

The problem with "Duplicate and Save" is that it implies that saving is an action that you can take, rather than something which has already happened. As arrrg said, that's not true: in Lion apps, every document which has a name is always saved. There is no longer a state of "changed but not saved".

Change the label to "Duplicate and Save" and us old folks, trained for thirty years to be constantly seeking and pressing "Save" lest we lose everything, will be complaining that there's no way to "Save" without also "Duplicating". Which would not promote understanding, either.

Don't worry, if you and the OP miss the old world of unsaved documents you can always find some old-school applications that preserve the old behavior. Join us Emacs users in the land of hoary UX paradigms! ;)

I'm not sure what word processing software you've been using for the past decade, but periodic backups and automatic restoration is more or less the norm, now. Heck, even my code editor persists unsaved buffers between sessions.

I think the last time I lost unsaved work in a due to a program crash was probably last millennium. That's the root of my surprise here; there are proven solutions that don't break existing workflows. Why did Apple decide to break them now?

Huh?

Word and Open Office have been recovering crashed documents, including unnamed, never-saved-documents, for quite a while. When that happens, it is a little confusing since you have to overwrite the existing document with the later version. But it also only occasionally happens whereas I often use the save-as functionality.

Also: “Save as …” is a deprecated feature (basically). You can’t even see it in the menu. There is only a keyboard shortcut for it – for those traditionalists who can’t let go. It’s not going to make the new document model worse (which is a massive improvement over the past) just to keep “Save as …” working.

Documents always save. They never not save. You can easily revert or access versions. You can easily create new versions (for example by clicking “Save” in the menu or by pressing Command+S). You can easily duplicate and immediately rename documents.

Here is an analogy one could one make to the current implementation -- you request to be billed later, but instead the full amount is deducted from your bank account now, and you are also sent another bill in the mail a week later, which you pay because you didn't know you already paid for it.

Something makes me think that there are a lot of giant egos at Apple now, making eccentric decisions, and Steve Jobs isn't around to tell them they are stupid.

The real end goal here is for Apple to somehow figure out a way for the average person to have the power of modern version control while still understanding it. This is a good goal, and we should laude Apple for it.

People using "Save As" frequently don't know that they want a duplicate before they start changing things. Sometimes what I think is going to be a minor change ends up being a major change, and I want to "fork" the document.

Think of it in git terms:

I start a changeset, and after some work, find that the changeset is too big or too unstable or too hard to merge upstream. So, I `stash`, `checkout new-branch`, `stash pop`, `commit` (or just `stash && stash apply`)

This new workflow is effectively: `commit`, `checkout new-branch`. Crap, now my unstable changes are committed to my master, and to fix them and get back to what I was working on, I have to `checkout master`, `reset --hard HEAD^`, `checkout new-branch`.

It's annoying and presumptive. If git did this, there would be rioting in the e-streets.

Let me give one example - I sometimes want to read the content of the file (inside its own app), maybe make some changes and then Save As a new version. I do this mostly in MS Word (for Mac and thankfully they haven't gotten rid of Save As yet). We keep different version in different files, especially for our team. Updating the original file by default is simply stupid in my case.

It may appear that UI designers are just working in ivory towers, pushing arbitrary and capricious changes down upon you. When you find yourself thinking that way, just think of the poor caveman.

"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

That is the perfect antithesis to Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, the list goes on.

Also, with the new Versions stuff in Lion/Mountain Lion you don't have any extra data leakage. The latest file on disk (depends on the app I guess, but most naive apps that use Versions) will be just that, the latest, unlike Word where retrieving old versions/text is relatively simple and can cause an hotbed of issues...

Then I press Cmd-Z a few times and save again. It's really not so bad. And in this supposed glorious brave new world of auto-versioning, the old version is still available right? So even if I totally forgot it still wasn't "dangerous", at least any more than the new behavior is so.