Kitcatt Nohr Digitas

We have come a long was since the days of biorhythm graphs crawling along green and black monitors. A really long way. But despite immense leaps in technology some concepts and ideas have remained the same. Pretty much unchanged and so embedded in the minds of both users and developers, that moving away from them seems utterly impossible.

Thankfully, there are some shining examples showing us what can be achieved when developers (and users) think outside of the box. As with all great ideas they seem so simple, and so intuitive that when we seem them, we wonder why are things done in any other way?

So here they are. My favourite new software concepts: No save & Persistent undo, No registration, and File system integration

I will start with the one I like best: No save & Persistent undo, the other two will be coming in the next few days. I know. Suspense is killing you. 

No save & Persistent undo is such a simple concept that I am struggling to think what to write about it. As title says: No save, and persistent undo. You edit your file, you close application, and when you came back to it, you are exactly where you left off. Even the undo steps appear.

The best implementation of this concept I can think off is in Lightroom. This overall brilliant photo management and editing software from Adobe has this feature executed perfectly. Lets take an example. 

I have a photo I would like to edit. I’ll find the photo, and double click it. So far, everything is normal:

Now i do some stuff to make it just the way i like it:

Nothing new here either. History panel dully records everything I do. So I am happy with this photo now, but hod on: where is Save?

Am I glad to report that there isn’t one. You see, the original file was never changed. Not one little bit. The black and white image you see is “virtual”. It does not exist as file. What is saved is a list of steps I took to make the image this way. If I now close the program, my image remains unchanged. And a very tiny file is saved next to the image (so called side-car file) which only contains meta data information (remove this spot here, and there, and make tone curve this way, and convert to black and white in this fashion).

Isn’t that clever?

When I open this image again, Lightroom reads this side-car file, and applies settings. Same effect as if I saved the actual image. Well not exactly the same, because had I saved the image I would loose colour. Using this method I can go back to this and make another version, in colour this time:

Now I have 3 images. And instead of using 35MB of my hard disk space (3 images @ 12MB each) I only use 12 (one image to start with and 2 files of negligible 16KB each with instructions on how to make image variations i like)

If I want to share any of these variations I can instruct Lightroom to export the image with these settings applied. 

This is very important. Having the ability to collapse all the changes, and just produce a file. I do not necessarily want to share with other people how i got to the file I am sending. 

Last year Google launched now doomed Google Wave. It had a similar concept of no save and persistent undos, but it failed to include the ability to “bake” the settings into a permanent state. 

Not a very good idea. Would I like to share with you how I wrote this? Would I like you to see a playback with all my errors and amends and spelling mistakes? Certainly not. But I am more than willing to share with you this finished article. 

However, I would like to have the ability to go back through it my self. Maybe there is an idea for my next blog post in that bit that I have just deleted.