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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?"
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.
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.
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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
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.
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.
Of course, neither is as intuitive for typical users as selecting "Save" from a menu or clicking a "Save" button on a toolbar. Sine EMACS and vi are typically used by enthusiasts/professionals, the issue of intuitiveness is essentially moot.
Learn to Play Go
No keystrokes are really intuitive, they all have to be learnt. Some English speakers may claim C-s means save, but why not C-w for write,C-b for backup or C-d for disk etc?
so what does theWhy do you have to w(rite) rather than s(ave), and why do you have to q(uit), or is
Standard keystrokes or standard icons, or both, are best as that way we only have to learn two ways to save things.
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
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".
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.
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!"
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.
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.