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   With 10.8.2, Mountain Lion Saves Even Better

   Matt Neuburg

   In '[1]The Very Model of a Modern Mountain Lion Document,' 7 August
   2012, I noted the many improvements in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion (over
   10.7 Lion) in the document-saving behavior of applications that have
   been updated to use the built-in Autosave architecture. One nice touch,
   I mentioned, was the return of File > Save As, which had been
   suppressed in Lion. But the behavior of File > Save As in Mountain
   Lion, I went on to say, left much to be desired. Although it does allow
   you to give the current document a new name and location, and although
   it does cause the current document window to switch to editing the new
   document rather than the old one, it also saves the current document as
   the current document closes, behind the scenes. This is
   counterintuitive and possibly dangerous behavior, especially since a
   common reason for choosing File > Save As has always been to shift
   unsaved changes in an open document to a copy without affecting the
   original.

   The good news is that this problem is solved in the recently released
   OS X 10.8.2 (see '[2]OS X 10.8.2 Eases Notification Center, Messages
   Frustrations,' 19 September 2012). And the even better news is that it
   is solved ingeniously, in a way that makes everybody happy. Once again,
   Apple has (to my astonishment, though after quite some time) shown a
   willingness to listen to user complaints and to resolve difficulties
   with insight and elegance.

   When you choose File > Save As in 10.8.2, a Save dialog appears. This
   has always been the case; I stress that point, because I want to
   impress upon you that Apple's solution involves no new dialogs of any
   kind. The change is within that Save dialog. If the current document
   contains unsaved changes, the Save dialog now offers a checkbox, 'Keep
   changes in original document.' Moreover, that checkbox is unchecked by
   default, meaning that if you do nothing, you will not keep the changes
   in the original document ' thus restoring the expected behavior of Save
   As. And this checkbox can appear regardless of your settings in the
   document management checkboxes of the General preference pane.

   [3][tn_keepinsaveas.jpg]

   This simple expedient puts paid to the entire matter. If you ignore the
   checkbox and simply proceed to save the new copy of the document, File
   > Save As will behave exactly as you expect: the new document will be
   created and you will find you're editing it, while in the meantime the
   unsaved changes in the original have been retracted. If you're like me,
   you will in fact ignore the checkbox, and thus the addition of this
   feature will mean no more work than before: you'll be using Save As
   just as you've been using it since System 6, and with the same results.

   But the nice thing about the checkbox is that, for those people or
   those occasions when you explicitly do want to save the unsaved changes
   in the original document, you have the option to do so. Apple could
   have restored the original behavior of Save As, plain and simple;
   instead, they went further, restoring that behavior while letting you
   switch to the new behavior instead. I can only applaud. This is exactly
   the sort of thing I'd like to see more of ' excellent default behavior
   along with freedom of choice to override those defaults ' in contrast
   to the 'Big Brother knows best' quality that resulted in my reluctance
   to use Lion.

References

   1. http://tidbits.com/article/13187
   2. http://tidbits.com/article/13274
   3. http://tidbits.com/resources/2012-09/keepinsaveas.png

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