Automatic State Saving in Lion

Douglas Hill •

Sorry, this post is about a month later than it ought to have been.

Chris Clark at Release Candidate One:

I let out the biggest “finally!” today during the Lion preview event, when Steve Jobs said one of the things Apple has learned from iOS apps that they are intent on bringing to Mac OS X apps is stateful pause and resume.

…

Well-behaved apps do this already, as there’s nothing stopping developers from rolling their own auto-save/restore/crash-recovery scheme.

It occurred to me that many of Apple’s key changes with Lion could just be changes in the human interface guidelines rather than system level technical changes.

Here are the six key Lion features, from around fifty-six minutes into the Back to the Mac event:

Steve Jobs at the event with the list: Multi-Touch gestures, App Store, App Home screens, Full screen apps, Auto save, Apps resume when launched

I am very much looking forward to automatic saving and state preservation. This is a big part of why I love Notational Velocity so much. In particular, I’m looking forwards to this in Pages and Safari. (Extensions like SafariRestore shouldn't be necessary for this.)