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Modernizing the Save Icon?
floppy-less asks: "In nearly every modern GUI, the floppy disk icon is used to symbolize saving files. With the fate of floppy disks becoming apparent, what will become of the esteemed 'Save to Disk' icon? Will it become a CD-R? a hard drive? a portrait of Jesus?"
It'll be a butt with a checkmark over it.
Moses invests.
echo
Plastic wrap, or foil, how about tupperware. How about a wedding ring, symbolizing commitment?
What, you mean you dan't use floppies anymore?
I think it will be a while before floppies are trully obsoleted as floppies are a very economical way of transporting small files arond as you don't need to worry about driver problems, internet connection etc. Yes CDs are nice, but who wants to carry around something that will probably crack in your bag when you fall.
Just guessing here, but it will probably stay the same for quite some time. Truthfully, to me, it has already lost meaning as being a floppy and has become the defacto save. If fact, I wouldn't be suprised if it lasts long enough so that most people might not know what the origin of the icon really is...
Who says it has to change? People know that the floppy disk on an icon means it has something to with saving: why waste the effort changing it, and dealing with the confusion that would inevitably result?
Names and icons don't have to be literal to have meaning: floppy disks aren't really floppy anymore, are they?
My laptop has an LCD screen, but I don't get confused when I go into Windows display properties and see an icon for a CRT.
This space intentionally left blank.
I actually wouldn't have noticed if any of the toolbar icons had changed. Save is either CTRL-S or :wq, depending on whether or not I'm having a good day (:wq) or a bad day (CTRL-S). I can't remember the last time I did something with a tool bar. Even web browsing, the only feature I use from the bar is to type in URLs. Back, forward, refresh---all hotkeys.
I'm sure they are important to some people, but I'm not going to see it.
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
HALLELUJAH! PRAYZ THE OS, my DOCUMENT has been SAYV'D!
... soiled.
Uhm, excuse me whilst I go cleanse myself. I feel
What the hell is this? Did some news item spur this question? Or was it just some guy scratching his head one day and decided to ask a stupid question out of boredom? This isn't even an Ask Slashdot item. News for Nerds, indeed!
Last time I saw a thread like this, consensus was that the general public wouldn't know what a hard drive looked like if you tried to use that.
:wq
looks nothing like a floppy...what are you people smoking?
The 3.5" variety just happen to be covered by a plastic exoskeleton and a metal access door. If you take apart one of these and one of the soft covered 5.25" floppies, the media are essentially the same.
Hate to say it, any hard drive represenation is boring. The normal Comp sci represenation, a cylinder, would be cool but confusing to a techie. A picutre of an external, a grey box with a little green light, would mean nothing to even techies. (do you mean turn something on?). Having a picture of an internal hard drive would be even more confusing to the non-techie type (having never seen a HD).
Maybe we need that little MS product dog to stick a file into its magic collar! That's more like saving to me [Ducks the MS haters]
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
I've already seen a few programs (though I can't find any examples now that I look) that have a folder with an arrow pointing into it for "save" and out of it for "open". I think that's fairly intuitive.
Many people already do not know what the floppy disk save icon is - I've heard at least two people say "click on the little TV to save".
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
The floppy icon will be around for a while. The rotary telephone is still used quite often. They are icons in the true sense.
you don't "save" using any of these, right?
Instead you commit, or upload, or send.
Maybe you'll click "Check" when you're ready,
and the file will do what it needs to do--
commit itself, upload itself, send, save, etc.
Cheers, Joel
Save me Jeebus!!
I hope that instead of a save button, some programs will constantly save work and provide a timeline-like feature to go through all changes in the document if neccessary. Obviously, it'll need a clear history feature for publishing, and it'll need a smart algorithm to save memory/diskspace.
It's just the "save icon". Maybe it doesn't look like anything anybody has ever seen but that doesn't prevent it from acquiring the necessary meaning.
Computers are full of anacronisms... My favorite is the strerror() output for ENOTTY (on some systems, probably pre-posix): "Not a typewriter". Well, duh...
I think the saving function will be marked with a floppy disk for the forseeable future and it doesn't matter anyway. Folders in a GUI don't have that much in common with real-life folders anymore either. The floppy disk/file save idiom is almost like an established cultural understanding in computers now, so there won't be any change until the function fundamentally changes.
Saving is really just committing to all of your changes since the last checkpoint/save point. If the idea of "Save" changes at all it might focus along those lines with an icon for the function related more to committment than to physical storage devices.
-- John Truong
And both are a heck of a lot better than 'Alt, f, s, Alt, f, x', the way it was done with EDIT under DOS.
I've come across dozens of people who seriously believe that the computer casing is the hard drive. Anything within the big box with the power button is the hard drive to them.
What makes it much, much worse is that they NEVER LEARN. Ever! I've tried explaining it to some of them several times to no avail.
(-1 Redundant)
How about an icon of a keychain flash drive?
As much as I wish it were, the floppy is a device that simply refuses to die.
I went for three years without using a Floppy and finally just broke down and bought a USB floppy drive. There is just no easier way to flash a bios and make a backup.
Floppy disks are well suited to their current day task of saving small files and flashing the bios.
This coming from a person who uses a Thumbdrive, DVD-RW, or a Archos 20GB hdd to transport files.
Hey! Why not?
He gives you the thumbs up for saving!
Which picture of Jesus? The one where he is hanging on a cross, or the one where he is a shepherd with sheep around him[1].
Not that it matters, we don't know what Jesus looks like, there are no historical accounts. We can guess a little: he was Jewish which specifies some general things.
[1]Interestingly enough, there is no account of Jesus having anything to do with sheep. He was the carpenter's son (it was supposed by those who didn't accept the divine birth story), and recognized as such when he went to his home village.
Note, please don't take this into religious arguments. Nobody will be convinced so you end up wasting your time.
My bet is on the removal of the save button in many applications. As information becomes easier for programs to verify and catagorize, inputed information will be saved automaticly. Similarly Copy / Paste will probably depriciate as automatic catagorization causes information to flow to the right locations. One example of a better used Copy / Paste is in come calculator programs. Selecting what to copy is not required. Copy automaticly grabs the number shown. An example that shows the deprication of the save button would be the automatic parsing and catagorizig of sentences as they are typed. Nothing would need to be manually saved as the information would already be in the right spot and saved automaticly.
None of the Macintosh apps I use have 'save' in the toolbar. For file saving, you can either do file:save, or you can do cmd-S. The only app I can think of which might have a save icon in its toolbar is Acrobat Reader, which IIRC is a 3.5" floppy which hasn't been pertinent on the Mac since 1998.
There are 10 kinds of people: ones who understand ternary, ones who don't, and ones who think this joke is about binary
If you classify KDE as a modern GUI, then what isn't?!?!?! DesqView for DOS?
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if by now the majority of users think that icon somehow universally means 'Save' or if they think that's what actually inside their computer doing the saving. You know, the little thing that goes clicky-click inside there.
Plus images of floppies still tend to persist in movies and the like. Somehow they are real "hardcore computer hacker" tools or something.
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
quite obviously a picture of a condom
I still hear sound "icons" like the chunk-chunk-chunk of a teletype in the background of an "important news flash" or the sound of a needle skidding off a record in current radio ads. These technologies have been out of widespread use longer than the floppy.
At least the floppy icon is fairly standard so unlike icons such as the magnifying glass (is it "search" or is it "zoom") it doesn't leave me guessing.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
I know how people hate hearing that "Apple has already done it" but it must be said. In MacOS they've replaced the picture of a floppy used for their save icon with a holographic crystal. You've all heard that all Apple hardware comes with holographic drives now right?
Michael.
Linux : Mac
Can we finally discard the anachronism of "saving" your work to nonvolatile storage? Back when all media was both slow and removable, it made sense to burden the user with this responsibility. But now, it's well past time for orthogonal persistance.
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
..just the letter S?
"Derp de derp."
Let's bring back the B:\ drive. I'm tired of living in a third-world, well third-letter anyway, society.
When was the last time you saw a 5 1/2" foppy disk anyway? Relax - it's a rhetorical question. I know you're looking at one right now.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
The computer should play "Save me, Jebus!" when you click on it
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
Never underestimate the inertia of a large group of people. When was the last time disks were floppy?
To those it may concern:
Yes, I know the 3 1/2's are floppy when when removed from their protective case. Please, pre-moderate yourself "-1, pedantic."
Ok, you can have Save be the portrait of Jesus if you have the Trash Can become a portrait of Bush.
You're going to try to convince me that there aren't literal manila folders inside my computer?
Maybe you should stop taking your floppies in to the pub with you.
prior art
Save To USB Stick
It occurred to me as I read this that I frequently save my work while in vi, but I couldn't remember the command I used to do so.
I had to start a session, and watch my fingers while I pressed "save", to realise how hard-coded :w is in my brain!
Toolbars filled with unidentifiable pictures seem to be the norm these days. Instead of guessing what they mean, I drag the little arrow to the words that say what I want to do. Programmers don't seem to get that nouns are rarely a good representation for verbs, and the only verbs mouse actions give you are "activate this" and "apply this to that".
Just you wait 'til I get that Opteron so I can break the 1GB VM addressing barrier.
It's sort of funny that in the Six Million Dollar Man, the best sound those Fembots can give off is that of line printers printing and tape reels whirring (sounds pop up when the Fembots are "thinking").
How about those ubiquitous "scanning" sounds you hear in suspense movies when the computer monitor redraws?
A Hammer and Chisel. Yeah, nobody uses it anymore, but we all know what it means.
And with storage as big as it is now, who deletes anything nowadays.
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
Save should be ctrl-s (or apple-s) in every application. It should also be in roughly the same place in the leftmost menu as it is in every other app.
Why do you need a third way of saving? Do you feel the same need for a 'quit' icon?
I've only seen a few apps with save icons on the mac, generally from Microsoft, who either didn't understand the idea of Apple's user interface quitelines or decided to undermine them in a fit of envy. Luckily you can throw away the pointless save icon using tools>customise in the office apps. I recommend a thorough pruning with this trick to all office users - and you should also look through the other icons that are off by default to see if any do things that currently take up a lot of your time with menu-meandering.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Radio buttons in dialogs.
For you real young 'uns, up until the late 80's car radios had analog tuners and station presets were controlled by push buttons that had state. Only one button could be in at a time, and if you pushed another button it would pop out to the unpushed state.
Modern digitally tuned radios do have buttons, but they do not have any visible persistent state. They are momentary contact.
We keep using "radio buttons" in dialogs because the ergonomics are similar: we want to indicate that an exclusive choice is to be made and show the current state of the choice. They just work. But future generations will scratch there head and wonder what "radio" has to do with anything. They'll probably come up with some strange explanation.
It reminds me of one job I had in the 80's at a company that used Macs. All the mac users had been trained by Unix people, and these in turn had trained other people. By the time I got there, it was common for people to have a folder where they organized programs, helpfully labelled "Bin of Applications".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
a brain?
or a secretary?
or the arm and head of a hd that animates when you click it?
makes sense, right?
http://ablegray.com
Why the flying f*** would you want to have an icon to represent the action of saving a file????
I'm sorry, but none of the applications I use from day to day have icons to represent different things you do. For the most part, they have a menu called File, and under it is Save. Why in the world would you want to take up real estate on your screen with a cutesy little picture that you can click on to save your file?
And no, I'm not being an elitist I-use-the-command-line-why-can't-yo-mama-use-it-to o snob. In fact, wase of use is enhanced by having consistent user interfaces in all GUI apps. The universal standard is to have a File menu with Save under it. Everybody who has touched a computer within the last decade understands that.
Find free books.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 uses a ZIP disk for the save icon. That's slightly more modern...
The whole concept of saving files (including the word itself) is counter-intuitive to most people. If you know that the computer makes a temporary copy of the file and then wants to copy the new file over the old one, then the word makes sense. You've made changes to a different file. But the average user doesn't realize this, nor should they. They think that what they see on the screen is the file. When I edit a file, any fool looking at the screen can see that the changes have been made. Why would the computer ask you to do something you have already done? Intuitively, the screen represents the current state of the file, so if I wish to stop working on a document, it implies that I'm satisfied with its contents. If I create a new file, add some data and then try to close the document, at that point the software should intervene and ask me to pick a name for the file.
I could see a person accustomed to using the word 'save' in the phrase "I'm not sure I really need this any more, should I throw it away? No, I'll save it, just in case..." to interpret the save prompt in the same way, i.e. I've decided to discard the changes I'm making, but maybe I'll save them in case I want to make a permanent change later, more like a recycle bin.
My suggestion is get rid of 'save' altogether, and replace it with something like 'Confirm your changes', and a big green check mark in place of the floppy disk. Why bother the user with an icon representing the mechanics of the operation?
"It's Dot Com!"
Because that is basically what you're doing with a save. You're taking a snapshot of whatever you are currently working on and saving an image of it at this point in time. It can even be used for a system backup because all it really is, is a snapshot of an entire computer at a particular time.
I would make the icon itself a picture of a camera with the flash going off. When you're viewing a listing of "snapshots" they could be little thumbnail pictures of the document made to look like a photograph with little white borders all the way around them. You could use "albums" to view all your snapshots. For versioning it's easy to visualize "this is the 4th picture I took of this project on thursday". You could have custom albums of "all the snapshots I took last week" or "all the snapshots of that document since I started working on it in May".
The photography analogy is easy to extend because everyone is familiar with it. A snapshot is whatever the photographer was looking at at the time they took the picture. You can make "duplicate copies of your prints" to give to other people. You can have additional copies of your prints made if you need more. You can save copies of your prints in photo albums and stored away for safe keeping. etc...
No offense to Apple, but whenever I see the StupidaMouse concept art, I keep thinking of the whole top of the mouse's case as one button. All that giving a one-button USB mouse to users who refuse to learn would keep them from doing is right-clicking.
Ctrl-S (or cmd-S for the mac), n00b!
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
If "copy" wasn't a required component of the action, you can be sure a lot more developers would leave it out for simplity's sake. Autosave has existed in software as a concept and as an implementation for a very long time. The most basic example is keeping the settings when a program shuts down. You don't tell it where to save unless you want to in almost every case.
But I still want to be able to save explicitly. Taking away the save button for whatever reason, limits the user to "expected behaviour" or whatever configurable options are available for the automatic feature. Even when I set Word to autosave every 2 minutes, after having lost large chunks of formatting work and many minute changes, I still like to make a "feel-good" save every 30 seconds, if I'm doing something highly incremental.
Changing the "floppy disk/television/square blue thingy" defeats the purpose of using icons in the first place. Icons are used because clear pictoral representations are identified by the human brain faster than text. This is in part, because these representation are used consistently. go to Europe: male/female, homme/femme, man/vrouw are all represented with the same basic icon. In general computing, save is associated with the image of a floppy disk, whether people know it consciously or not. Go to any program on a computer in a foreign language (japanese is fun to see!) and try and find the save button based on icons. non-geek or not, you'd probably find it a lot faster if it looked like a floppy disk (I won't get into arrows pointing this way and that). Go to any foreign public place and look for the bathroom on signs alone. What do you look for first? the male/female signs. How can you differentiate between a men's bathroom and a women's bathroom? It's not because most of the women around you are wearing skirts (I'd assume in peak hour pants to be in the majority). It's because the icon is historically associated in your head with the female bathroom in public places.
As it is, save will always be around. The other posters noting "Jesus saves" are correct in their use of the word. Save stands for exactly that. To keep for later. It doesn't matter what the representation of save is, as long as people can identify the representation. History has given us the floppy disk. Why change it?
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
Do you find it sicker that I've made a mock-up of a toolbar icon for ^x^s (Emacs save command) or that I've made one for :w (vi save command) as well?
Railway crossings are still represented by steam engines, even though these have largely disappeared from the railways, and the old rotary telephone is still the icon for it. I don't think updating the symbol as icons get updated is a good idea. Icons are symbols that have a meaning, in exactly the same way that keyboard sequences and menu positions are. These have become standardised (the old q-edit sequence is 'esc,q,q', or some of the IBM programs, which MSD follows, is 'F3'.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Can we finally discard the anachronism of "saving" your work to nonvolatile storage?
Problem is that most environments that try to implement persistence without a "save" icon don't implement the rollback semantic that a "revert to saved version" or "close without saving" command provides. I have lost data in a word processor on the Newton platform when it automatically committed my typing immediately after an accidental Select All.
Save should be ctrl-s (or apple-s) in every application.
Strong tags seem to exclude exceptions to the rule. So when I try to crawl backward (Ctrl == crouch, S == move backward) in a first-person shooter, do you claim that the game should quicksave instead?
There's plenty of other iconography and terms that are used in computing but represent obsolete technology: calling your screen a desktop (I even have a little picture of a blotter on my Windows taskbar to get to my desktop. How many kids know what a blotter is?), calling a buffer in memory a clipboard (do you propose changing that name to 'PDA'?) ,calling a directory a file folder, even the term 'file.' itself. And what about the term cut and paste?
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
*lying* under a tarp...
Quick, off the top of your head, what does a red octagon with a white outline
represent? How about a button on a GUI that looks like a pair of scissors?
What about a red circle with a red line across it from the lower left to the
upper right? A button on the corner of a screen window that has an X in it?
Do *any* of these things actually look like the object or process that they
represent? Does it matter?
A good icon is simple, visually distinctive, easy to recognize instantly,
consistent across many interfaces. The floppy disk icon for save is all of
these things, and it's also familiar to almost every experienced computer user.
It could be simplified a little (removing some superfluous details, like the
label and the little readonly-lock thingydo), but the basic visual is already
quite simple and distinctive. Nobody's going to mistake it for (say) the paste
button. Sure, it's an anachronism, but the standard icons for cutting and
pasting are scissors and paste, respectively, and nobody's used *that* method
of cutting and pasting since word processing came into vogue. So what? The
icons are visually distinctive enough (well, the scissors are; they should
probably have used a roll of transparent tape for paste, but it's too late to
change that now) and their meaning is well established.
Have you looked at the icon on a power button lately? (No, not your old 8-bit
micro with the toggle rocker with 0 for off and 1 for on; something that was
manufactured this century.) On virtually every device it's the same. Why
exactly that specific symbol means "power" is quite beyond me (why not a
lightning bolt or something?), but everybody knows it's the power button
because it's the power button on everything -- computers, monitors, UPS units,
even a growing number of kitchen appliances. This is a Good Thing(TM).
So, take that picture of a floppy, simplify it into a basic icon, and use
it to represent the concept of saving from now on. It doesn't matter if
half the people clicking on it have never seen an actual factual floppy
diskette and don't know the history behind the symbol; they won't have to
look at very many applications before they learn it's the universal symbol
for "save changes".
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
If that is the case, some people might think that they have to take snapshots of every page they type. Well, at least until they open the document for the second page.
Hopefully the icon will only animate, on say, a mouse over.
I would have to say it is a good point though.
Cheers
Mathematician, n.:
Someone who believes imaginary things appear right before your i's.
Personally, I use command-s. Crazy clutterd windows toolbars make me woozy.
Ahahahahahahaha...... Bwahahahahaha..... snigger.... *wipe tears from eyes*
Ah such fond memories - the new 10 pack of floppies, the floppy cleaner, and two adjacent (un-networkable pcs). Clean, copy, error, repeat. Disassemble drives, clean heads manually. Clean, copy, error, repeat. Disassemble other pc's and transfer different floppy drives into the pc's. Clean, copy, error, repeat.
Chuck a tantrum, smash the fsck out of all your floppy drives and disks , throw them away. Rip out hard drive and insert into other pc...
Q.
Insert Signature Here
wow, worst ask slashdot ever
The truth about this campaign is it's a ploy by anti-slash trolls to get zealots to identify themselves by marking the user windows a foe. Windows is not part of the scheme, but because he happens to use that uid, he has become an unwilling participant in it. At the same time, anti-slash trolls have accounts accumulating karma and have a significant amount of mod points (150 or so) between the accounts at a time. These mod points will then be used to modbomb the zealots that mark windows as a foe.
Your defense against this is to mark windows as a friend instead of as a foe.
Remember, anti-slash does not support free speech. They exist only to bring about the destruction of the best nerd community site on the internet. Fight back by marking windows as a friend, users.pl as a foe, and re-posting this comment in reply to any comment you see suggesting that people ought to mark windows as a foe.
Stop the next wave of anti-slash attacks in their tracks. If you thought the crapflooding was bad, they have worse things in store.
The box is the harddrive and the screen is the computer.
I still go for keeping the traditional 3.5" floppy disk because the existing users have already been trained to look for it. Though your argument for your analogy is good, I wouldn't be suprised in the least sense if users confused it with something relating to actual photography.
That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard. Thank God you don't work in graphic design or UI design.
How do I know you don't work in graphic or UI design? Well, duh.
Then why is Mac OS X, the operating system known for ease of use, using a giant photo-realistic picture of a hard drive right smack on the desktop by default?
Come to think of it, are there *any* places in OSX (as Apple ships it, dont include 3rd party crap) where a floppy disk is used to denote "save"? I think most stuff is self saving, there's no icon, or there's a picture of a hard disk.
People will learn. Way back in the day, floppies looked funny too. But now even average Joes are buying hard drives, so it's recognizable.
Piggy Bank
Life Preserver (I know gnome uses this someplace else, can't remember where)
Food in a tupperware like container
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
I'm curious: do the Windows 1.03 installation floppies still function? And do you have them backed up on some other media as well?
Heck, my college (no names named for the moment), when I got there in 1995, taught PASCAL, and we debugged our code at the teletypes. Of course, this whole thread is going to start a "Well, I dumped chads from our punchcard machine in the toilet..." stories. But I am somewhat aghast when I think of a school program using teletypes in 1995 for a CS class.
Then again, those CS majors did awfully well out in the real world.
I installed them on a Compaq Portable III just last month. They worked great. I didn't do the install off the originals, they are far too rare and valuable to use for the 'regular grind.' I made copies of them using the PC-DOS 3.3 'diskcopy' command to brand new 5-1/4" floppies and worked from the copies.
I don't have a 5-1/4" drive installed on any 'modern' hardware at present. It would be good to image them using WinImage or the 'dd' command. I think I probably did that eight or more years ago, though, when I got my first CD writer and was imaging all my floppies and stuff.
Oh, Windows 1.03 sucks.
---
I remember one of my first ah has with my Palm was the realization that I didn't have to hit save. It just was saved automatically. I could type a few words and hit the off button and it would just be there when I turned it on next. I love this, and wonder how long before the PC interface gets to the steady state point of view.
Ah, but what happens when everyone is using their camera phones (Japan already has 4MP), and the camera itself is dead?
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
People tend to intepret icons literally. If I saw an icon of a camera, I would guess that it was for importing images from a digital camera.
(emacs zealots refrain from modding, plz)
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Heh, what about a fridge? Fridges 'save' your food, i.e. keeping it fresh and from going off. I don't see fridges getting replaced by any funky new cooling device in the near to mid future
Oh, Windows 1.03 sucks.
You must be one of those linux fanatics...
Daniel
Carpe Diem
here in germany traffic signs with cars or trains are replaced by signs with cars and trains of more moderen appierence
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
Jesus saves...
And takes half damage!
The whole idea of Load and Save is from stems from a time where loading and saving took considerable amouth of time. Why do I have to press "Save" all the time. Why can't my edits be persistent right on. Save and load should be replaced by open and close together with a undo function. Normally you want to save your changes, and only in case of an error you want to undo your mistakes.
The floppy disk as "save" is a convention... an unfortunate consequence of history. Conventions have no meaning, Symbols do. Conventions are cultural and periodic in that they will change across geography and time. Good symbols, universal symbols do not. The 'eject' symbol, 'power' symbol, they represent a verb, an action, a function... they are good symbols.
Save, record, keep, store... all synonyms which should have the same symbol... I think the record symbol is the best.... it is flexible and can be applied to context. A red button... a red circle with black outline.... perfect, simple, if it stays depressed it is recording a stream, if it depresses and then comes back it has recorded one version... one save.
Bam! I've solved the dillema...
Come on... it's so damn simple. Just use it already.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Replace the floppy icon with a pen. (write to disk)
Replace the floppy icon with a little piggy bank. (save)
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Really, I have. So I opted for something equally as "obsolete". My 'save' icon is a pencil and paper.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Why exactly that specific symbol means "power" is quite beyond me.
Well, if the rocker switch has 2 positions, and a symbol for each, when both functions are set to the same button, you simply assign both symbols tho the same button by superimposing one onto the other. That's how it makes sense.
Oh, and with the scissors, they make sense for 'cut' because that's what scisors do. They cut. (paper, your finger, the cat's tail if they're sharp enough, etc.)
... followed by an agreement that you are not violating any patent or DMCA laws and that your compnay is holding themselves harmless for any potential legal actions you may incur by saving this document. as well as the understanding that Microsoft will save this document *somewhere* in all perpetuity and the feds have all rights to look at it whenever and wherever they want.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
What if we ignored the media and think instead about the process: saving as making the data become fixed in a medium, making it physical. (Yes, this would also encompass printing, but let's put that aside for a moment.)
I'd recommend an icon that shows 1's and 0's as three-dimensional representations of the digits in perspective. Four should be enough, arranged as so: Maybe with a smattering of pixels arranging themselves into the voxels making up the icon, depicting how the zero-dimensional data is becoming fixed on three-dimensional media.
A bonus: this works for other outputs. Focusing the pixels into a line would mean to send out over a network (sending the data serially or streaming it). Arranging them in a two-dimensional representation of the digits could be printing.
And as long as it fits the cultural method for reading (use i18n to display the appropriate icon for the region), it can work for the reverse as well: capturing a stream from the net, scanning in a document, or loading data from media.
Or just an arrow pointing down to a horizontal line. That could work too. Simple isn't vague when in the appropriate context.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
You could take snapshots of your document every so often, and later jump back to any previous snapshot.
I guess I'm just bitter that the developers of the word processor app for the Newton OS where I lost data forgot to implement an easy way for the user to make an anonymous snapshot that gets replaced every time the user chooses to make a new snapshot.
Didn't Newton OS have multiple levels of Undo?
No, or not in the app I used. It had an Undo command that changed to Redo when chosen.
as well as let you make permanent snapshots of your document as you're working on it.
Except most users trained on the status-quo behavior (Ctrl+S makes an anonymous snapshot; document reverts to last anonymous snapshot on a crash) might become frustrated when they have to think of a unique name for each snapshot (the behavior for "Save As" in current apps). Some designers might want to implement snapshotting in terms of a revision control system (CVS, Subversion, BK, Arch), but then users who just want to type up a thank-you letter will feel under even more pressure to come up with a name for each snapshot describing what changes the user made in that snapshot.
...oh no wait, that would be the 'shave' button. my bad.
Make it optional. Use sequential unique names and an empty comment so that there's transparent unlimited "undo of save", and let the user hit an alternate key if they want to do formal revision control, which would allow comments, branching, and so on. Emacs can do something like this: you can switch on unlimited backups of the form foo~n, and engage vc-mode when you want to do the real thing.
That way the next gen will have no problems grasping its use
There used to be a Mac program which found every unique icon on the machine and displayed them all on one screen. Terrifying.
The fact the Microsoft thought that representing the save action as an icon of any kind simply underscores their basic mis-understanding of the GUI metaphor.
How about a "home" button. Click it, and it brings up your preferred file manager. You can then drag and drop the document where you wish to save it.
Laying is spelled just fine. It's the wrong word, unless you speak Country.
Also plug that baby into a top-o-the line PC and you will make the thing 'look' like yesterday's tech. Good thief deterrent.
Of course, on the Commodore 8-bits that surround me with the exception of three 1581s all the other disk drives are 5.25" (...and some Apple and Atari Drives in the closet).
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Any GEM or Geoworks fan can tell you that Windows 1.03 sucks.
I mean, I have actual 'killer apps' for GEM, like Ventura Publisher. I have one app for Windows 1.03 that actually makes it worth running (In*A*Vision) but that's about it.
---
My computer has both a 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives. I just kept them both around when I upgraded, since they both still work fine. I haven't used the 5.25" floppy in about half a year though, when I tried to read my old copy of the game "Conflict" for MS-DOS. Unfortunately the disk had some read errors. That was one of my favorite games. You got to control Israel, and tried to collapse all of the arab countries around you. Does anybody happen to still have a working copy by any chance?
Best Slashdot comment ever
"the originals...are far too rare and valuable to use for the 'regular grind.'"
Exactly. I just recently (finally) pitched some old Win3.0 disks that were still in great shape - because I never used them (that is, their condition was because I never used them, although that's also why I pitched them. Hmm. Anyway..).
I think the argument is, if you are going to actually use the disks, handle them, transport them and such, floppies are the most damageable (existing standard for) media.
OR, you show the superimposed icon and a one, to signify on/off. I've actually seen this on electronic devices from various well known companies. Apparently, designers have decided that a one and a zero mean off, but a one by itself means on. Go figure.
PS
This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R were eliminated. (mitchhedberg.net)
8-)
Typewriter (QEDIT did macros way back when)
Stone tablet (Vern Buerg's LIST displays upper ASCII)
gewg_
I ran GEM on this Athlon 2000+ last month to convert a .img logo to a more modern format. Then I realized that the people publishing that newsletter had been doing it on 15-year-old software, and they were publishing it quite well. As for the save button, &File | &Save works well and is pretty universal, so why not encapsulate that into a button?
There are 1.1... kinds of people.