Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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...
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)
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.
Do this test. Put a cd in a jewel case. Try to break it with your hands. Now do the same for a floppy. See the difference? If you're involved in an accident that will break the cd in your pocket or purse, you should be worrying more about your spine than your lost data.
... unless you EM insulate them, your data will be more vulnerable. On my college campus, there were so many underground wires and EM pollution, floppies were constantly getting erased or corrupted. Not to mention the schmutz factor.
As for floppies
Amen.
I worked in a college computer lab. Every day I tried to recover one or two busted floppies. It was the only thing the Macs were good for. Their "SuperDrives" were better for recovering PC floppies than real PCs.
Floppies are less economical and less durable than CD-Rs in every way. Putting a floppy in your backpack is begging for trouble. The "correct" solution would be network drives, but even English majors figured out the next best thing: Email the file to yourself.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
> 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.
Ah, but Microsoft has updated the Windows control panel icon for Displays. And they've done so at a point in time (2001) when CRT's are still hugely common (and useful). Compare the CRT to a floppy, and the floppy is far more obsolete.
I just asked my non-geek roommate, "What's the last time you used a floppy disk?" And he thought for a minute and said, "I can't remember!" That's how yesterday the floppy disk is. Sure, it's needed to boot a computer that's so old it can't boot from CD, but that just means a rescue floppy has a place in a PC maint/repair kit, along with spare jumpers, and a Windows 95 install CD. It doesn't make it any less obsolete.
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...
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.
I use vim and RCS for this purpose.
RCS allows me to check in and out revisions, and each revision has a change log. I can roll back changes, check differences, and even make my own branch of a file.
Subversion, CVS, Arch and many others also can fill the same role. Heck, you can even make a directory named backup and rename a copy of the file to 'myfile_date'. The reason why I settled on RCS is that its relatively simple to use and its cross platform (Linux, BSD, Windows-via-Cygwin, etc). I've been tempted to adopt one of the larger revision control systems for additional features, but haven't gotten around to it.
As for Vim, its cross platform, rather full featured, and if the power goes out, I still can recover the file. Plus its easy to use with RCS through a few simple aliases and/or keymaps. There is also Gnu Emacs or XEmacs and a host of other good text editors.
Sure, there could be one program that would do both, but that wouldn't be as useful. The unix philosophy of "do one thing, and do it well" is less of a pain in the long run. This way, I can reuse my $editor_of_choice in many other unix applications - slrn, mutt, etc. If I had one integrated program, sooner or later I'd become fed up with one part of it or another, and I would be forced to continue using it.
Just my $.02.
YMMV.
My suggestion is get rid of 'save' altogether, and replace it with something like 'Confirm your changes'
Be careful of being quoted out of context. Other people who propose getting rid of "save" often propose solutions that would incidentally get rid of "revert" as well.
I have to defend the old scissors icon for "cut". It's always made perfect sense to me. But, then again, I grew up actually doing "real" cut-&-pasting with some scissors, glue and a photocopier.
No no! If you're going to exit, you should use Alt-up-up-enter-enter.
I still use this in almost every program with a "File"-menu, and when it doesn't work, it really irritating, forcing me to find the F4 button instead or grabbing the mouse. Interface designers, take note!
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
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.
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.
Users may not be aware of the security implications of what the software is doing. There could be some incriminating information that they deleted in the current document, but remains in the older versions. Remember the Office metadata and hidden "deleted" data fiascos reported here on /.?
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.
Ah, but can you give me one example of another computer storage media that is as widely supported in the computer world, even today? Sure, different operating systems may format the disk differently so one particular floppy-disk may not be directly usable on any machine, but the floppy in general is still everywhere.
I for one can't think of any other media that has surpassed the floppy in terms of ease of use, wide support and read-write ability. The ones that come the closest, like write-on-the-fly CD-RW, USB flash sticks or ZIP disks, are severely outnumbered and handicapped by the competition among various vendors trying to impose their own proprietary products.
Think about it: the closest second in popularity is actually the write-once CD. But can you go to a mate's computer with a CD in hand and leave 10 seconds later with a file on it, like you can with a floppy? Without having to fire up special CD-writing software? Without having to throw the disk sometime later? Without having seconds thoughts about shelling out the dough for a quality CD-RW? Without having to format or re-erase it previously?
Let's face it, the floppy-disk was and is an yet unsurpassed success, at least for me, and I seriously question the once-in-a-while attempts of PC vendors like Dell who try to ban it.
I've seen the "floppy is so obsolete" oppinion arise again and again. Yet no one seems to really be able to offer something as good in return, otherwise it would have disapeared by now, would it have not? It's not like the plotting of evil leprechauns is the thing keeping floppies around, they're still around for a sound reason.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
I'm almost 29 and I never did put 2 and 2 together on the radio button thing. I always figured it was some corrupted form of radial button since they were always circles in windows. Motif squares make more sense when you're thinking of those old style radios. Thanks Bill!
The Mac had 'em round before Windows. Some much older cars actually had round radio buttons; at the time this would have been archaic but recognizable. Round was chosen because gives a visual cue that the buttons are different than checkboxes; this kind of subtle thing was a big part of the Mac design philosophy. Motif demonstrates that this visual cue is not critical,but it is useful.
Visual design tends to swing between squareish and roundish. Round was in in the 40s and 50s. Cars (and even appliances) had rounded curves (the tailfins being the exception). Design in the 60's and 70's emphasized sharp straight edges, epitomized by the large, boxy cars, often with gratuitous creases in body panels. Check out the car in Starsky and Hutch -- even the paint job creates angles and points. I assure you this was a very cool automobile back in the 70s. The buttons on the radio followed along and also became boxy. In the 80s, the Ford Taurus ushered in the melted look. The retro PT cruiser and VW Bug pretty much hark back to the rounded days of the 50s. You'll also note that buttons on car radios these days tend to be oval.
Computer design lags design in general, probably because geeks are not very up to date on such things. However, if you see somebody trying to give an app an innovative look, you'll see extremely rounded buttons (Aqua) or in some cases round edged windows (certain media player skins). The original iMac was and example in hardware which pretty much borrowed the old rounded look. In computer terms it was the equivalent of the PT Cruiser, harking back to the old Lear Siegler ADM-3 (try googling for an image), except lacking its crisp creases. 70's design married curves and creases.
I expect crisp edges will make a comeback in design some time in the next decade. It'll either come back as boxiness, or a 70's retro curves and creases look. Expect to see media player skins with severely rectangular buttons etc.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.)