I recently upgraded to iWork ‘09. I don’t use Pages or Numbers for anything, but Keynote is my preferred presentation software, so I thought it was good to get the latest version. The new animation features are ok, but the most interesting update so far is the possibility to control presentations from an iPhone.
While the first version of Keynote crashed once in a while, I can’t remember one single crash with the ‘07 version. I guess this was one of the reasons I didn’t take enough care when I was working on a presentation last night, and obviously forgot to save what seems to be half an hour of editing. That backfired on me now when Keynote for some reason decided to die when changing between two pages in edit mode. Spending time on recreating the slides is annoying, but I am still puzzled about the fact that none of the iWork applications have an autosave function. Is there any logical reason Apple has chosen to omit this type of functionality?
The whole incident reminded me about a blog post that Hans Steiner wrote some years back called Ditch File -> Save!, where he asks why we have a save function at all. In fact, several of the programs I use on a daily basis do not have any save button, e.g. Journler. You change something and it is there.