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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?"
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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Floppies are dead at the enthusiast level (hell keychain dongles are cool - but of course I don't have one of those), I think they are dropping out of the home market, and have no idea what is going on in the corprate market in general (I guess I have a couple floppy drives on machines buried somewhere in my office)
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
The floppy icon will be around for a while. The rotary telephone is still used quite often. They are icons in the true sense.
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.
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
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.
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.