I've just thought about this. I'm not sure if this is a good idea, it may be naive as well. I'm yet to search and confirm if there exists any solution already. I'll confirm with my friends shortly and update this. However anyone who reads this and knows about an existing operating system feature that provides this capability, please leave a comment.
There may have been situations where we felt like "I wish there was an 'undo' to revert a previous action" at the operating system level rather than at the application level.
We already have very good undo capability at the application level to revert to the previous stage of editing/work using Ctrl-Z, "u" and so on.
What if the operating system has the capability to revert to a previous state. Please do not mix this with Mac's TimeMachine or Sun's snapshot and various other *NIX capabilities that provides "files backup or snapshot of the filesystem". You are right, this thought/idea will eventually involve a "persistent mechanism" to hold the "state information" though.
In case
1) I've closed an application window and of course after saving the current work. However I want the application to be open again just with an "Undo" rather than launching it afresh and opening the "recent document or work".
Now, this requires an operating system capability to "record" and "navigate" to the application state. Mozilla Firefox, Google chrome and several such applications have the "save session" and returning to previous session support at the application level.
2) I've resized an application window and rather than resizing back to the older size I just want an "Undo".
3) I've uninstalled/installed an application of course properly answering all question of "un-install wizard" and I want to revert.
Do you think I'm crazy? may be. However what if I've done this while I was half asleep?
These are few trivial situations there may be much more real demanding needs.
Any ideas?
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Hi,
ReplyDelete1. Reverting application state needs to be done by each app, from an OS perspective, it already does, when u hibernate and resume
2. This is very interesting, but atleast, every app should have a default setting and you can delete the app settings to revert it back to default setting
3. Third is already there!! Yes it is available in solaris and opensolaris. With their powerfull ZFS, Containers and DTrace, solaris is an unbeatable beast
Using ZFS rollback you can go to any number of checkpoints.
Even windows provides a basic restore!!
Just check the ZFS clones and ZFS snapshots, you will be amazed. There is no opensource or proprietary competition to ZFS till now.
ReplyDeleteBrtfs is a new filesystem, started development only last year to compete with ZFS.
Like how you thought, ZFS has thought long before and providing incremental restores (like storing only diff), fast compression, ...
Also think of RAID, why people went for RAID hard disk array.
ReplyDeleteLike minds think alike. Like how you thought of saving your app state and maintain stability.
This is the key area and we know why some servers are never down.