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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?"
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?
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.
You're going to try to convince me that there aren't literal manila folders inside my computer?
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".
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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.