autosaving on exit Re: [Bf-funboard] Re: "Quit without saving changes?"/"Save changes?" popup...

[Luke Wenke]

> Yep, this was on my list to do... when you have "temp saving" enabled
> every few minutes, it doesn't harm to save another time on quit.

If the person has a 5 or 10 Mb document and a slowish computer, this could
get annoying... and if compression is enabled, saving happens quite
slowly... they might have saved just before they exited anyway and so expect
to be able to quickly quit...

> Offering a choice at exit "do you want to save unsaved work" is only
> useful when it really makes sense to ask...

Yeah, it would only ask you that question if some changes had been made
since the last save... (the hard part seems to be determining whether any
changes have been made since the last save)

> still, I rather then build
> a convention that blender *always* saves at exit, and *always* loads
> this at start. That's much closer to the philosophy Blender was built
> on.

If the user quit blender last time without saving the latest changes, when
you start up blender it would load the file that was automatically saved
when you quit (or the temp file that was saved before blender crashed). But
if the user did save the latest changes to the document before quitting
blender, then I don't think a second copy of this document should be saved.
By the way, I think the titlebar should show the filename, like this:
Untitled - Blender
That's because I sometimes have 3 different blender documents running, and
then I'd be able to tell them apart in the Windows task bar. A more on-topic
reason is that it would allow this to be shown in the titlebar (if there was
autosaving and blender crashed) (Based on MS Word) :
DocumentName.blend (recovered) - Blender

Then if the user saved the document, it would look like this:
DocumentName.blend - Blender

If the user was asked the question "Quit without saving changes?" and they
answered yes, this implies that the changes have been discarded though... so
when blender is restarted it would load the last manually saved file. If the
question is never asked and saving happens automatically on exit (only if
changes have been made since the last save) then there wouldn't be that kind
of problem. So I guess no question should be asked when you exit.

If the user hadn't saved their changes (but blender did) and was Blender
restarted, maybe the titlebar could also say
DocumentName.blend (recovered) - Blender
or
DocumentName.blend (unsaved changes) - Blender
or
DocumentName.blend* - Blender

That way they know that the current document that automatically loaded up
with blender isn't identical to the one saved as "DocumentName.blend".

- Luke.