>In a reaction to the question whether to use or not to use explicit save strategies,
>i think we should take a look at the users world.
>
>Alan Cooper has written a very interesting book "ABOUT FACE" which was a real eye-opener to me. The main message was: DON'T LET THE USERS PAY. In this book he declared that programmers are very different from users and don't even know it.
>
>COOPER SAYS
>Don't use explicit save modes: the following example:
>
>A (beginning) user is making changes in a document (could be a table). When he's (or she's) finished, the user closes the document. Then the program aks the user if he wants to save the document or not. The user thinks WHAT THE HELL IS THIS ??? Why is the program asking me this. If i didn't want to save the changes i would have undo them before i closed the document (in the real world, Users don't write letters put them in envelopes and after that decide if they want to send them or not).
>
>a second argument not to use explicit save modes: If you prompt dialog boxes for every time there is something to save, the user don't read this messages anymore and presses ENTER or ESCAPE when he sees a dialog box. When a real important messagebox is showing the users will instinctivly press enter or escape without reading the messages.
>
>In my programs i use implicit saving. Every time the user makes changes they are saved at certain points. If the user don't want to save the changes they must explicitly undo them.
>
>Another thing which is real popular, are the messages "Are u sure, you want to close the program ?" Yes of course i'm sure, i would not have pressed ALT+F4 if i didn't want to close this program.
>
>Much of the thing we program seem so natural to us as a developer, but are really inherrited by older programming strategies which should not be used anymore. It is time to make our programs easy to use without hundreds of dialog boxes which only confuses users, let make them mistakes, and reduces productivity.
>
>I think this book by ALAN COOPER is a real MUST for developpers who want to lear more about User Interfaces, develop strategies etc.

IMO, it doesn't matter how a user will perceive saving data. It's much more important to design the interface that any changes which are seemingly important for a user, will not require any serious changes in code itself, i.e. any (even most fanciful user's request) will be done quickly and users will be happy. How it's usually done. You separate interface from data and move all 'save_data' related code to generic method and after this you can call it from any place you want: button.click or form.destroy or form.keypress or navbutton.click etc.