[LINK] real version control finally

Kim Holburn kim at holburn.net
Tue Jul 26 07:58:57 AEST 2011


I was reading the ars technica review of Lion and I came across this page.  Finally we have an operating system with real, built-in, automatic version control.  

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars/7

> Despite decades of public exposure to personal computers, human expectations and habits have stubbornly refused to align with the traditional model of creating, opening, and saving documents. The tales of woe have become clichés:
> • The student who writes for an hour without saving and loses everything when the application crashes.
> • The businessman who accidentally saves over the "good" version of a document, then takes it upon himself to independently reinvent version control—poorly—by compulsively saving each new revision of every document under slightly different names.


etc.

> At this point, we can no longer call this a problem of education. We've tried education for years upon years; children have been born and grown to adulthood in the PC era. And yet even the geekiest among us have lost data, time, or both due to a "stupid" mistake related to creating, opening, and saving documents.

.....

> Lion introduces a variant of this practice: autosave in place. Rather than creating a new file alongside the original, Lion continuously saves changes directly to the open document.

.....

> The user does not have to manually manage multiple copies of document files in order to retrieve old versions.

.....

> Restoring the document to an earlier state actually just pushes a duplicate of that state to the front of the stack of all changes. In other words, restoring a document to its state as of an hour ago does not discard all the changes that happened during that hour.


For text documents this might be a breakthrough.

Hmmm... How much disk space will maintaining all the edits on a photoshop document take?

-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
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