Auto-save and versions

Increasingly, applications avoid exposing any distinction between their state in memory and their state on disk. Changes you make to a document or collection are saved automatically. Examples in Gnome include Rhythmbox, Tomboy, and F-Spot. Examples on other operating systems include Microsoft OneNote and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. For Gnome there should be a standard interface pattern for auto-saving applications to follow, so that they are consistent with manual-saving applications on the features they share.

Auto-saving leads naturally to having revision control for your documents, like in Google Documents. People may want to consult older versions of a document before it got modified incorrectly.

Making use of window titles as document titles / filenames

In document windows, we can make better use of the area for window titles. We can make the window title be an editable text entry, so that you can change the filename right there. We can also use extra space in the title bar to add functions useful to navigation, such as showing the parent folder where a document is located.

Here is a general mockup of this idea:

And some options for implementing this: