June 2, 2000
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Simson Garfinkel asks the question Why can’t operating system designers build a better undo feature? Programming hurdles aside, developing an unlimited, intelligent undo would alleviate many torturous user experience problems that we limp along with today. Always being able to step as far back through the creative or document building process as you want would certainly lessen the “learning through disaster” approach that many of us experience when using software. Photoshop (and other recent Adobe applications) have a History Palette that allows you to step back through changes in your document, but this relies on saving incremental document changes to a file. It is an extremely memory and scratch disk intensive process. Your regression back through time is ultimately limited by your hard drive space. One of the better “nearly infinite undo” functions exists in BBEdit. I have never had a case where I couldn’t go back to the original state of a document. It’s not perfect, since some functions provided by application plug-ins do not adhere to the same undo mechanism. Unbelievably, some applications still don’t have any undo functionality at all. And how long have we been using “modern” operating systems? Via Scripting News
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