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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
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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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?
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.
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.
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?
I can honestly say I've never seen such a thing.
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".
Even web browsing, the only feature I use from the bar is to type in URLs. Back, forward, refresh---all hotkeys.
.toolbarbutton-icon{height: 32px !important;
width: 32px !important;}" in your userchrome.css),
but that just stretches the 16x16 icons rather than
using actual 32x32 icons. Though at least, if the
icon only includes a 32x32 icon, it will
use that correctly. But aside from that peeve,
I consider this the best thing to happen to
web browsers since standardized CSS support.
Waaaaay offtopic (show some love, Mods), but have you checked out the "Personal Toolbar" on Mozilla since v1.4? Go into the about:config and set "browser.chrome.favicons" to "true", and "browser.chrome.load_toolbar_icons" to "2" (I have no idea why Mozilla has these off by default, with not even a regular preferences option to turn them on). Now, all of the bookmarks in your "Personal Toolbar" folder will use icons (each will update after the next time you click it), allowing you erase their text description completely and still use them. So, instead of fitting a dozen or so personal favorites as a mere line of densely packed text, you can fit almost 50 of them on a typical screen.
For an extra 20 pixels of horizontal space, I no longer need to use any of the bookmark folders, and only rarely need to type in a URL. And if the icons hit the end of the personal toolbar, just do a "sort folder" by "last visited", and get rid of the ones you never use.
Truly wonderful. I too used to consider all the stupid little toolbar icons as less than useful (they take up screen space, after all!), but since discovering you can basically have an iconic representation of your most commonly used bookmarks, I've "learned to love the bomb", so to speak.
My only wish regarding the personal toolbar... I figured out how to make it 32 pixels high (just stick "toolbarbutton.bookmark-item >
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.
Me too! But I tell them "That's wrong, if you call it the hard drive, computer people will think you're stupid, it's really called a modem, and if it ever makes a funny noise, that means someone's trying to break into your system, unplug it immediately!"
They'll proudly call it a modem from now on to impress us with their sophistication. That's the geek way of marking the territory to warn other geeks of danger.
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...
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.
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
(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
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.)