Thanks very much for your comments and +5 for actually making some changes already!!!

With auto-save, one thing you could do is show time since last save (or till next save). It would take a little screen space and require a timer, but I thought some kind of feedback like that is worth it to help the user understand the saving model. Alternatively, an auto-save checkbox.

The cut and paste issue is a complicated one. Unfortunately, you can’t really copy and paste from your own button in a universal way. Our copy/paste works by intercepting the browser’s native copy and paste events, which only fire when you use the command-c, command-v keyboard shortcuts (or ctrl for windows).

I did fix the paste placement issue. Pasted objects are now offset from each other at regular intervals.

I also changed our text selection color to match the native selection color, and added in a bit of transparency in browsers that support it.

As for auto-save, we do in fact have it. It turns out that autosaving is a challenging UI problem. You want it to be transparent to the user, and yet be available when its needed. The way our autosave works is designed to do exactly that.

You’ll never know autosave is doings its thing unless the application crashes on you. If that happens, when you try to open a saved document, we’ll notice that you have a newer autosaved version, and prompt you to open that instead (there’s also a warning indicator on the file in the open panel).

Essentially, doing it this way makes autosave a recovery tool, not a replacement for regular saving. The manual save when you want to “check in” the state of your document model is well established, and something people are comfortable with. Although this isn’t necessarily the last word on the topic, I think our autosave mechanism achieves a reasonable balance.

With respect to undo, we’ve made more things undoable with our latest release. Now, so far as I can tell, the only action that cannot be undone is changing the color of something. This is because when you choose colors via the color wheel, we register 100s of undos, which becomes a pain very quickly. We’re working on a solution to this, but I do not know when it will be available.

Everything else is great feedback, and we’ll be looking into it all in the future. Thanks again for writing, and keep in touch as you continue to use 280 Slides!

By the way, you may want to check out our latest feature: Import. Now you can import your existing PPT, PPTX, and ODP documents.