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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?
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.
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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.
: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.
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
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
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
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.
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)
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!
Why is Christ portrayed with sheep? Psalm 23? The references to Christ as a lamb and shepherd thick throughout the Gospels? I'm no Christian, but this stuff is basic Western Civ, man.
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
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.
You're going to try to convince me that there aren't literal manila folders inside my computer?
prepare for an offtopic..
couldn't figure out why my printer was jammed, looked inside, and i see a little green army man trying to help me out.
thanks son..:-)
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
I can honestly say I've never seen such a thing.
Exactly right. The icon should represent the idea behind saving rather than the actual physical media itself. And one thing that will not change in the near future is the serialization of our virtual world into a stream of bits to be laid down one by one onto a writing surface. Therefore "Serialization" should be the concept that becomes iconified so that no change of paradigm in the future will leave us mystified once again as to what is meant by some digital Picasso's amorphous pictograph.
Of course we should take care to differentiate the type of serial that we mean from its homonym 'cereal' so that we don't end up with little pictures of Lucky the Leprachaun all over our programs. Because with his fruity image and rainbow coalition colored marshmellows, Lucky could too easily be confused with the command to "change your preferences". Therefore I propose that a small picture of Charlie Manson be used to represent the Save command. Think about it. He is a universally recognized 20th century figure who will forever be associated with the word "serial". And using his image without permission shouldn't be much of a problem. After all, what's he gonna do, sue for defamation of character? Furthermore any religious types out there who don't want to explain his relevance to their children can just tell them it is Jesus and 'Jesus Saves' as the original post suggested. I mean, come on, have you ever seen a tiny picture of Charlie Manson and a tiny picture of Jesus side by side? As long as they don't get out a magnifying glass and notice the swastika on his forehead, who could tell? And if Rod and Todd do happen to notice, tell them it is just a caste mark that the Indian programmers put there because they were jealous and wish Jesus had been one of them.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
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".
Oh! yeah, economical my arse.
;) more $0.02
A blank CD-RW costs $0.90 (AUD) or so, a blank floppy costs about $1.10. The CD not only holds better than 400 Floppies worth of data, it is cheaper to boot. So, explain to me how the floppy is economical.. particularly since the floppy *might* survive a couple of hundred rewrites and the CD-RW is good for 10k or so.
err!
jak
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!"
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...
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?
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.
Personally, I use command-s. Crazy clutterd windows toolbars make me woozy.
wow, worst ask slashdot ever
Such ignorance begs to be corrected.
Read John 10:11 in which Jesus says: "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep." He says again in verse 14: "I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me." That is merely a small portion of that passage. The passage is entitled "The Shepherd and His Flock." Almost the whole chapter of John 10 deals with Jesus and sheep.
Read my blog: HansMast.com
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.
(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
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.
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.)
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.