🚀 go-pugleaf

>The auto-save feature appears to have been a "neat hack" with little
>thought given to its actual use.  Now auto-save in itself is an excellent
>feature, but it should NEVER alter the original file without the explicit
>consent of the user.  I would be very interested in hearing how this was
>justified.

A couple of reasons of the top of my head:

o Technical: Trying to save and batch changes would take an amazing amount
	of memory and the overhead woul slow things down significantly.
	To do what Hypercard does at the speed it does, they had to do it
	this way.

o Design: A good claim can be made that every time you push a button (or
	type in a field, etc...) that you've made an impllicit agreement to
	save with the application, so an explicit save isn't necessary. Many
	applications work this way on the mac (one example: filemaker plus).
	it might be nice to have a hypercard option to make a backup of a
	stack on StackOPen (in fact, you can probably write it into the
	stack script) but it should be optional.

>One thing is for sure: auto-save will be "fixed" in some manner.  Otherwise
>Hypercard will never be able to open the much-hyped CD-ROM stacks!

I don't see this at all. Set the user level to 'browse' only, and you're all
set for CD-ROM. Since you can't change it, just let the user sniff around.

chuq
Chuq Von Rospach					chuq@sun.COM
Editor, OtherRealms					Delphi: CHUQ