The example of Pages from the article has actually since been changed to do the same thing.

Red "Delete" on the far left, then on the far right a gray/neutral "Cancel" button, and an orange (the app's primary color) "Save"

A power user who’s aware they didn’t save would be confused, as there isn’t any file to delete. I would prefer “Discard”, which would also be applicable to the case of not saving changes to an existing file, where “Delete” would be entirely inappropriate.

"Delete" is the wrong verb, suggests I'm deleting the file, which I'm not. Sure you could say, well you're deleting the unsaved changes, but this isn't what it means on any other computer or even in other Mac apps.

The same update (Lion?) ruined saving overall. Apple has insisted that apps should never have a "save as." You can hold opt to do it anyway, but it silently overwrites the original too. Maybe or maybe not lets me revert, and idk where even those revisions are stored. Apple might've hoped this catches on, but again nothing else does it this way. I get they want me to duplicate the file first, but no, I already made changes that I want to save-as, it's too late to duplicate.

If they were going for blurring the line between memory and disk, that didn't work either because there is still the concept of saved vs unsaved changes (that can get "deleted"). It's not like Google Docs.

Remember in 1990 (the pictures are from around then) there wasn't unlimited fast disk space. There was a good chance you were saving to a floppy disk which not only was slow, but might not be in the drive all the time. At least in 1990 you could assume a hard drive - but you couldn't safely assume there was enough free space on the drive to save anything, since 40mb drives filled fast.

35 years latter we live in a different world where you can assume an unlimited fast data connection to a data center. Saving and allowing undo is possible today.

I once heard Cooper talk at a conference. He said that he was indeed the father of Visual Basic, in the sense that he had a little participation at the inception but most of the work was done by someone else. I think you can draw a line between that kind of self deprecation and the ego level required to look through someone else's eyes and design good UI.

In the world of 2TB SSD’s, it does seem silly to risk inadvertently deleting an important ~2kb word document.

In general, I hate undo. I'd almost always rather confirm/decline. Undo is ephemeral, if I even notice it, and is a recovery from an accidental action (that I may or may not even know would have happened depending on the UI). Declining is a deliberate action.

Sydney Padua's awesome, mostly true, steampunk graphic novel "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage" jokes about the error messages that might have produced by the difference engine. One example occurs when a character tries to stop a sequence that may or may not destroy a precious manuscript:

Annulation lever activated!

Do you wish to continue?

Engage STOP lever to continue. Engage CONTINUE lever to stop.

Time remaining 5..4..3...

You could set a custom text by sending WM_SETTEXT to the respective button. It wasn’t a recommended practice, though.

And clicking outside the modal

Rip John C. Dvorak, writer of the Abort/Retry/Fail column from PC Magazine.

On a different note, never underestimate the value of a modal dialog that gives you a chance to retry an IO operation that failed. Loose USB cables and network shares over Wifi can make those happen a lot more often.

As I remember, standard operating procedure was to retry 4 or 5 times, then turn off the computer and walk away in frustration.

What always got me at the time was retry is understandable, but what the heck is the difference between abort and fail? I don't want to complain too much it was probably in the manual, but as a young teen during my DOS days (there are manuals? read?) The distinction was lost on me.

My understanding today is that one of them(fail?) gives the application a chance to do something clever. Did any application actually handle this gracefully? Something like, Disk 11/15 error(fail) Please put in recovery parity disk.

I'll take "Yes/No/Cancel" over the "Discover Windows 11/Remind Me Later" pairing that pops up on my arbitrarily non-upgradable PCs every month or so.

"Maybe later..."

Q: Do you think Microsoft¹ understands and respects the idea of consent? A: Yes / Ask Again Later

--------

[1] Or the BBC, or whoever, a great many are guilty of this sort of thing.

    enum DoesUserWantToSave {
      Yes,
      No,
      Cancel,
    }

:p

This was well known 20+ years ago: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/what_is_truth_0x3f_

Aspirin had (though this is increasingly dated) unique cultural currency as a headache medicine for quite a while after it stopped being the overwhelmingly dominant first-line OTC remedy.

Pretty sure "causes Aspirin sales to soar" is an attempt at cleverly saying "gives people headaches"

I try to keep to that, but sometimes the flag is turning on a negative feature, disabling that which is the default and will remain so for compatibility reasons.

Sometimes it is worth the effort of going through and changing the logic elsewhere to keep the boolean positive, sometimes that would be too much effort to retest at the time.

Another option I like, when I have a config object interpreting things so I'm reading doing `if (config.IsWhateverThatThingIsEnabled)` then I can just have paired properties to pick from when I want to check IsEnabled or IsDisabled.

I've come across code where there is an overide for an option to disable something and the naming plus the logical not really make you think about what is happening…

    if (!OverrideDisabledOptionToBlockAction) {}

However, if all tests happen to be of the form `if (!isValid)`, one might reconsider and use `isInvalid` instead.

For a site about usability, I was going to gripe about the tiny font, low contrast, and unresponsive layout until I saw that. It does look more suitable at 1024x768.

Good year