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July 25, 2003
always undo
A simple idea to bind into operating systems, the same as cut, copy and paste.
The way I use some apps encodes knowledge in them themselves, rather than the documents I am looking at or writing. An example is Safari - I use various pages, each with many tabs to store sections of browsing knowledge. Some I minimise, to deal with later, or to blog later.
Then I hit Apple-Q, instead of Apple-W, and it's all lost. PC readers note that it's even easier in most PC apps to do this - pick the wrong X and you close Word rather the document, for example.
The lazy way to stop this would be for each app to add an "are you sure you want to quit?" dialogue box - but more often than not, I really do want to quit (note that creation applications do this, but traditionally 'reading' applications don't).
Better would be undo built into the operating system. No matter what you've just done, you can undo (even several times).
This would also be useful in Mail, or NetNewsWire - I space through the entries very quickly, and sometimes my brain only registers interest after I've past it by. If I could just undo the last action, I would be back at what I wanted to look at (Agent on the PC implements this with the delete key, and is very useful).
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