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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?"
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...
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
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.