I go so far as to actually compose anything major offline – in another window, in another application that’s actually a file on my disk. If your browser crashes at the wrong time, then the email you’re composing goes away.

Yes, they will save what you are working on to a draft folder periodically but it’s not the same. In fact, there are applications that don’t really even have ‘Ctrl S’.Ĭomposing an email in a web browser, for example, if you’re using something like Gmail or. And of course, it’s just not in all applications. I’ve seen it do some awesome, awesome things, but it’s not something, to be honest, an experienced user really wants to rely on completely. Now I know that a lot of applications have crash recovery, and that’s great. And all that does is, it saves what you’re working on to disk, so that if you crash, if something happens, then the work is still there on disk ready for you to reload it. In many Windows applications that’s a shortcut for hitting the File menu and the Save option. Now exactly how you do that varies a lot depending on the application you’re using, but in a lot of applications, it’s the key sequence ‘Ctrl S’. One of which is to periodically, randomly, frequently, save your work to disk. Have that happen enough times, and you start to develop some interesting habits. The computer has crashed, the application has crashed, the window is closed, something happened, and all of the work that you had just been doing has disappeared – poof. You’re typing along doing whatever it is you’re doing, creating awesome content, writing blog posts, writing a document, writing a wonderful email – whatever and all of a sudden “poof” – it’s all gone. Well, here’s the deal: Anyone that’s used computers for any length of time has had this happen. And they’re also periodically typing the key sequence ‘Ctrl S’. I can get pretty fast, but it also means that I can do corrections pretty fast. I’m not really a very good typist I never learned touch typing or anything like that. They’re correcting errors constantly, and I have to admit, backspace by far is the most used key on my keyboard. It might not be touch typing (I know mine certainly is), but it’s absolutely very real.

Now, contrast that with real users, real geeks, real computer professionals. They never, ever hit the backspace key – never. Sometimes it’s just obvious that they’re not typing anything they’re just making it up. So have you ever noticed when you’re watching TV, and there’s computer geeks or some computer professional onscreen, you can almost always tell exactly how fake they are, because they’re typing – sometimes it’s just as bad as waving fingers over the keyboard.

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