Oliver Ker Design

SaveCircle - Don't Forget to Save

I have been looking for an app or plugin that would auto-save a working document, mainly to show clients how the design has been built up and it’s always nice to look back to see how the design has progressed.

Jon Hicks has recently shown the time line of his workings for Mailchimp and Silverback which shows how the logos progressed from sketches to final version. This provides an interesting drawing process that designers usually take for granted but I’m sure clients sometimes find helpful?

I think most designers (and others) periodically press ‘command+S’, because when that spinning beach-ball appears we worryingly think, “when did I last save!?” And when I save, unless you are in a habit of saving as different files then I just overwrite the file with the latest version removing the design stages.

I found SaveCircle

Although this app isn’t quite the solution I was looking for it could be quite useful. I wanted something that would save the current document every so often without alerting you, but save files in a folder for you to look at later.

• originalfile.psd
• originalfile1.jpg = Save 1
• originalfile2.jpg = Save 2
• originalfile3.jpg = Save 3

and so on… leaving you to save originalfile.psd until you finished.

Does this exist? anyone?

How can SaveCircle help?

In Preferences you select the way you wish to save, Save or Save as, but the point of this exercise is to save different files so I am setting to Save as so it will prompt me to save as a different file.

You can set the app to save which ever program you are currently using when the timer runs out by selecting Every frontmost applications, which I foresee might get annoying or just This frontmost applications and choose the design program.

If you do choose ‘This frontmost app’ and ‘Save as’ It will only prompt to save as, if this is the program you are using at the point the timer runs down. So if you only want to save the photoshop file and you are in mail then it wont ask you to save. You will also have to remember to save as a different file name.

Is this too labour intensive or could it be quite useful? Anyone tried out please leave your thoughts, or where I can find the perfect solution. I can always just try to remember to save at different stages, but haven’t we got enough to think about!

auto save, freelance web and print design, oliver ker, save as, savecircle, timed save, timer save