December 15th, 2006

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Technology
5 Comments »

Saving is So 20th Century

Over the past year, I’ve been doing an increasing amount of my work in Web applications instead of desktop software. I’ve been using Google Documents and Spreadsheets instead of Microsoft Word, and frequently use Gmail for Domains in the browser instead of Outlook.

One small but largely undiscussed advantage of using these apps is that you never have to save. They save for you, constantly and automatically. I know some desktop applications like Word can ‘recover’ when they crash, but it’s not as graceful, and you’re still expected to save.

I imagine that our kids will never have to worry about saving anything on their PCs–as soon as they type it, the machine will remember it.

Comments: 5 Responses so far

Derek K. Miller
December 15th, 2006
1:08 pm

There’s no reason desktop applications couldn’t save automatically exactly the same way. They just never really have, for the most part, and I’ve never understood why, at least in the modern computing era.

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Michael Kwan
December 15th, 2006
3:39 pm

Something makes me uncomfortable with leaving my personal banking and financial information online with Google Spreadsheets. Something about big brother….

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Andrea Coutu
December 15th, 2006
7:54 pm

Paperclip for the Commodore had auto-saving.

But I totally thought this post was going to be about fascination with debt.

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Mack D. Male
December 15th, 2006
10:36 pm

OneNote…it’s superb! No save functionality whatsoever, it just does it automagically.

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Erika
December 18th, 2006
6:27 am

Flashback to grade 9 or 10 when I heard a classmate whine, “How do you save???” This was on a Mac. And… it was about 6 years ago. We’d been using computers since grade 1 I think (mostly Macs) and this kid didn’t have the wherewithal to even *guess* what to do to save. Automatic saving did not exist, and most of my classmates couldn’t type above 40 wpm (if that). Ahh, those were the days.

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