>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.

Actually, we've been talking a lot about Cooper in that thread. I found it the single most revolutionary computer book I'd ever read.

>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.

When I first read Cooper, I agreed. Then, in a discussion on another network <s>, someone (it may even have been Jim Booth) mentioned the case where, in a multiuser app, a user makes a change to a record and wants to go out to lunch. She wants her change applied, but without an explicit save command, she'd have to realize that to save the record, she has to navigate away from it, or close the form. This seems to me to be just the kind of thing that Cooper argues against: forcing the user to understand the implementation of the program.

In other words, there is a time when changes should not be saved (while entering data into a textbox, e.g.) and a time when it should be saved (when the user has finished entering data into it). I don't think a program can always make that distinction, in which case, an explicit command is necessary.

>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.

These seem to have mostly gone away, thank goodness. They are especially annoying, since if you really did chose to close the program in error, you could just start it up again.