


Specifically, your app should denote that there are unsaved changes and present the Save dialog when the user tries to close the document, quit the app, log out, or restart.Losing an unsaved Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file due to the crashing of the Office app or abrupt shutdown of your Mac is entirely possible. When Auto Save is disabled, your app should exhibit the expected behavior when there are unsaved changes. Users can disable Auto Save by selecting the “Ask to keep changes when closing documents” checkbox in the General system preference pane. It’s fine to append an Edited suffix to the document's title in the title bar, but this suffix should be removed when the document is closed or the user manually performs a save.īehave appropriately when Auto Save is disabled. If a document can be autosaved, there shouldn’t be a dot on the close button in the document’s title bar and next to the document’s name in the Window menu. In general, use a dot to mark a modified document as unsaved only when it can't be autosaved. These behaviors ensure that work is always saved unless the user explicitly chooses not to keep it. If a document wasn’t previously saved and the user quits the app, logs out, or restarts, the document should automatically be saved in temporary form and restored the next time the app opens.

An existing document should save changes automatically whenever the user closes the document, quits the app, logs out, or restarts. Present a Save dialog only when the user explicitly tries to save or close a previously unsaved document containing content. For developer guidance, see the autosavesInPlace() function of NSDocument. Note that Auto Save requires minimal effort to adopt. Opt-in to Auto Save so they can rely on these behaviors in your app. In general, people expect their content to be saved continuously and without intervention. At any time, the user can browse through these saved versions and revert back to one.Įnable Auto Save if your app is document-based. When Auto Save is enabled, a version of the document is automatically saved at least once per hour, and each time the document is opened, duplicated, locked, renamed, reverted, or manually saved. Auto Save reduces manual work while editing documents, increasing focus on content creation and insuring the preservation of data. Document-based apps can implement Auto Save to automatically save versions of documents as the user works on them.
