“Many sites reported the ‘happy’ news that OS X Mountain Lion restores the Save As command, which was removed in OS X Lion,” David Morgenstern opines for ZDNet. “However, these cheers are undeserved.”
Morgenstern writes, “The problem is that Mountain Lion’s Save As isn’t the Save As that we knew and loved. Lloyd Chambers at the Mac Performance Guide tested and described the problem in a recent post. ‘If one edits a document, then chooses Save As, then BOTH the edited original document and the copy are saved, thus not only saving a new copy, but silently saving the original with the same changes, thus overwriting the original. If you notice this auto-whack, you can “Revert To” the older version*** (manually), but if you don’t notice, then at some later date you’ll be in for a confusing surprise. And maybe an OMG-what-happened (consider a customer invoice that was overwritten).'”
“It doesn’t surprise me that ‘Save As’ doesn’t work ‘as advertised.’ After all ‘Save’ doesn’t work ‘as advertised.’ In Apple’s brave new world, there is no ‘Save’ or ‘Save As.’ Everything you do is recorded, and you can always go back to previous versions of your work. There is no real destruction. It’s just not working the way we want it to work.
The way forward is to forget about Save As, and go back to ‘Duplicate’ which works with Apple’s new waveless paradigm,” Morgenstern writes. “He suggested that we just forget about Save As. If you want to modify a document, duplicate it from the very beginning of editing. And if you aren’t sure that you don’t want to keep changes, then quit the document without saving or save-as-ing.”
Morgenstern opines, “Apple is at fault here. As I’ve written before, the company is rejiggering the interface for its new user base and ignoring the longtime Mac user. This change is another influenced by the iOS paradigm. Perhaps Apple could offer us a Mac OS setting — as opposed to OS X, the new Lionized name — that would return the good ol’ Save As functionality to Lion and Mountain Lion.”
Read more in the full article here.
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How to bring back ‘Save As…’ to OS X Mountain Lion – July 31, 2012
‘Save As…’ silently resurrected in OS X Mountain Lion – June 12, 2012