Slashdot Mirror
Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
theodp writes "The Floppy Disk Icon, observes Scott Hanselman, means 'save' for a whole generation of people who have never seen one. That, and other old people icons that don't make sense anymore — Radio Buttons, Clipboards, Bookmarks, Address Books and Calendars, Voicemail, Manila Folder, Handset Phone, Magnifying Glass and Binoculars, Envelopes, Wrenches and Gears, Microphones, Photography, Televisions, Carbon Copies and Blueprints — are the subject of Hanselman's post on icons that are near or past retirement age, whose continued use is likely to make them iconic glyphs whose origins are shrouded in mystery to many."
Let's start a concerted effort to replace them all with emoticons and lolspeak! It's the only language the younger generation understands nowadays, and it will surely withstand the test of time, at least until everyone (or at least the majority of the world's population) speaks Chinese.
file save: => 101010 .cpp
radio buttons -> mutually exclusive buttons: oooOoo
clipboards -> tablets: [_]
bookmarks -> googling: [I'm feeling lucky]
Address books -> meatspace latitude: #
Calendars -> evites: [why are you late!]
Voicemail -> audiospam: (_o.O_)
Manila folder -> tag: [_^gt;
Handset phone -> smartphone: [_]-
Magnifying glass -> antburner: --O
Binoculars -> autofilter: >-
Envelopes -> GPG header: -- GPG Block --
Wrenches -> Text XML settings: <?xml?>
Gears -> Binary XML settings: 0_o
Microphones -> smartphones: [_]-
Photography -> smarthpones: [_]-
Televisions -> tablets: [_]
Carbon Copies -> DRM: Unskippable [FBI WARNING:]
Blueprints -gt; code:
OK, that was easy, next!
Increasing the number of symbols and words coming into usage and those going into obsolescence.
When watching 'TV' do teenagers still say 'turn' the 'channel'?
Text all the way.
Most of those images were invented only because it was expected at the time to have a picture for every action, which was kikd of stupid in first place.
I was the real korpiq until I woke up clowned.
Old people are the only ones who need icons to map directly to physical objects they're familiar with. Younger people simply learn the meanings of the icons directly, and they can look them up on Google or Wikipedia if they're curious about the icons' history.
Microphones...still used everywhere, they've just changed their shape.
Magnifying Glasses..still used to see small things, or did I miss out on the genetic change given people 20-10 eyesight.
Binoculars...see Magnifying glasses [I suppose they are less common just because fewer people seem to be spending time experiencing the great outdoors].
Televisions...um, what Universe is this tool living in?
Wrenches and Gears...I guess once everyone now over 30 dies, civilization ends or everything has switched to using magnets
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Borgified Bill Gates representing Microsoft?
Read it on ycombinator about a year ago.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So what do we use? Should we have a picture of a piece of fiber for everything? Maybe a few ones and zeroes? This is a non-issue by a blogger without enough new ideas.
Wrenches, gears, magnifying glasses, screw drivers. These are not obsolete tools. Kids still ride bicycles. Bicycles still have gears and near screw drivers and wrenches for adjustment and repair. Magnifying glasses aren't the most useful of items but they are still cheap and as often seen now as 20 years ago.
But all the other ones are just plain wrong...
Only the name is wrong with radio buttons...
I, and most other people who have to take paperwork away from a desk, use clipboards daily,
Books are still quite normal around here, especially if you've been to school,
People still use address books and calenders, electronic devices supplement them,
Voicemail icon yes, it is dated,
Every office I've been in has had lots of beige folders,
Almost every desk phone has a handset that looks somewhat like that, even VoIP phones,
Physical magnifying glasses and binocuilars are still for looking for stuff,
Most people around here still get at least bills in envelopes,
If said 20-something has ever known anyone who took shop classes they should know what a wrench is (though what a wrench has to do with settings, I don't know),
Microphones like that are still used in recording studios and on bar stages,
Polaroids look like prints...,
Might not know why it's got feelers, but it still looks like a TV,
Last time I made a carbon copy, I was filling out a waybill... last Thursday (also a mimeograph machine does not do carbon copies, it makes mimeographs)
Business plan for making $3.50 online:
1. Be an ignorant hipster microserf excitable attention whore
2. Write an ignorant article that makes you and your equally unenlightened followers giddy
3. Submit to slashdot and hope it's one of those new moronic editors who reviews it
4. Traffic
5. ??? (hint: cinnamon-chai lattés until your head implodes)
6. PROFIT!
This site's getting so bad, it's making Gizmodo look good.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The dollar sign is thought to be a slash through an eight representing 'pieces of eight', an older Spanish currency denomination, but everyone still knows what $ means. Icons that everyone is used to and that can be recognized as to their function should be left alone, for efficiency and a nice little piece of nostalgia.
I feel stupid saying this, but before reading this blurb (I refuse to click the link and give this guy hits), I never made the connection that radio buttons were from the old push-down / pop-up radio buttons.
Which just goes to show, iconography or UI elements don't have to have a connection to something commonly used or known to be understood. I've been able to use radio buttons fine for decades without realizing what the historical antecedent was.
Besides, who today hasn't seen a clipboard, bookmark, calendar, manila folder, magnifying glass, binocular, envelope, wrench or gears, microphone, photograph, or television? I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that in 50 years, all those things will still exist and still be commonly known. Most of those things are necessary as long as being a human still involves interacting with the physical world in some way. I don't think books will disappear, and I don't think tablets will end paper. Even if the devices themselves change (ie, binocular or magnifying glass into a unified electric optical device?), the analog remains.
Address Books and handset phones are likely to be things of the past, carbon copies pretty rare (though still very common today), and blue prints probably in the dustbin of history. If we got rid of "carbon copy" what would we rename the CC field to? "Other addresses that this message should go to, but not be the primary recipient of?" And BCC?
but the summary tells it like the icons will be ancient glyphs.
You should just top yourself, becuase you're a fucking loser.
Um, what?
This is one of the most horrible posts (not saying "article" because it's not- it's just a giant diatribe) I've ever seen on Slashdot. Why the hell is this shit on the front page?
I'm a graphics designer for a living (yes, I live off the income generated from my work). Reading this crap makes me think that this guy is either trolling or too goddam moronic to comprehend what he's trying to talk about. I haven't seen a floppy disk "save" icon in ages, radio buttons are NOT ICONS (they're widgets- it's like comparing a scroll bar to an icon- it's not, it's a goddam scrollbar), and I don't know what his beef is with everything else.
If he's so goddam brilliant, why isn't he offering suitable replacements instead of just saying "lol is teh sux0r 4 old people 4 sure1111111"?
Oh, wait, he thinks we should replace folders with giant abstract squares. That'll totally look better then a manilla folder for sure. Just look at the public outrage Adobe's icons cause every successive release- they've gone from those nice pre-CS icons (like the feather for Photoshop- what was up with that? Who cares, it looked good) to squares. With letters. In horrible colours with the complexity of something drawn in MS Paint.
I suppose in his ideal computing world, everything is that ugly. No thanks, I'll stick with my modern OS.
-AC
When I read the article I felt like the world at large has failed. With the resurgence of the DIY genre, why do the young ones have to be ignorant of history? It seems like the intention is to forget all that came before, so nobody can have an original idea. The irony is that many great, original, ideas are a rehash of some previous idea because it was the best way to do something.
As someone who grew up using floppies, building computers, learning to program, and finally leaving that arena to explore a career in one of the oldest professions, metalworking, I have a particular spot for history and nostalgia.
Just because every 14 year old kid has an ARM A5 processor strapped to them doesn't mean the lessons that were learned in the 80's, innovating computers and electronics, aren't just as applicable today.
I feel it takes an appreciation for the classical trades and the way things *were* done, to truly appreciate what we have -- and apply the hard won principles of yesteryear to tomorrow.
Sure, those icons stand for concepts that we rarely use today, but many of them were "obsolete" when they were invented. Further, what would we replace them with, what are the analogues today that people will unmistakebly associate those actions with? What, two fingers making a V? How about a curly swipey gesture?
The world is full of things past and present, let's not throw them away because the "future" beckons "futuristic" notions.
This article might have been interesting if it had actually suggested replacement icons.
But just pointing out that they're old?
It doesn't matter that their old, everyone that uses them knows what the icons mean because they've 'always' meant that. And those that don't just use menus.
Indeed, it's easy to complain, but difficult to offer real alternatives. Our world is increasingly non-physical such that there are few if any replacement images these days. So it seems you have 3 choices:
1. Use old-fashioned ideas
2. Use new-fashioned ones, which are either confusingly abstract or don't exist.
3. Don't use icons, period.
Most people recognize images faster than words (once learned), so 3 is out.
So let's see what you have with #2 before we toss #1. Show them or put up.
Table-ized A.I.
It doesn't actually matter if a kid has never seen a reel-to-reel tape player. The thing about symbols is, eventually they can stop being metaphors and start to have meaning in *themselves*.
Take for example the ampersand, &. It's a stylized, abbreviated form of the Latin word "et", meaning "and". You probably didn't know that, but you don't need to know Latin to understand that & means "and". The Latin letter "B" comes from the Phoenecian letter "bet" which also means "house", possibly because the letter once looked a bit like one. At this point the symbol is so far removed from its origin that we're not sure, but nobody cares. The Japanese katakana and hiragana writing systems work in a similar way: they're simplified versions of characters derived from Chinese symbols, and originally represented a word that starts with a certain sound. But now they just stand for the sound itself.
The same thing is happening with icons. 200 years from now, nobody will know what magnetic tape was, but so long as my new phone uses the same symbol for "voicemail" that my last one did, I'll be able to use it just fine.
What happens when you hit 2 at the same time in 2012? one action, the first you hit, so radio buttons still apply, you choose one, just like on your radio
Clipboards? anyone who doesnt sit at a desk all fucking day making up tripe articles has a use for a clipboard
Bookmarks? why is this on the list, do you have a better way to mark a book?
Spiral bound is strange? shit man someone better tell wallmart, they have an entire isle of them, and its often difficult to find college rule cause they sell out
Manila Folders? really dude? theres arguments over who gets the last couple folders in any workplace that actually has to keep up with paperwork, though it may be strange to you since your just writing on some yippy blog, and have nothing like sales or accounting
Envelopes, yea go drop a hundred bucks in cash in the night deposit or rent box with the slip attached via paperclip, see how far that gets you, again still relevant
Screwdrivers are something a 20 something has never seen? for fucks sake your really stretching, most put together cheap furniture that 20 somethings would buy for their party pad comes with one
Micophones, yea you are correct, that should be replaced with a "-", much clearer and mimics modern life to boot
Photography ... I dont know where your stretching to see this, windows shows me the picture in a box, paint has a artist pallet and brush, must be some mac crap or hippy linux nonsense
"Does your TV have "rabbit ears?"" why yes it does asswipe, its called DTV, it shows me the news and weather for free
"I'll "cc" you on that email. Last time I made a carbon copy I was using a mimeograph to do it". No you didnt mimeographs used a wet chemical process, and last time I bought a car, eh 2006 everything printed was on carbon paper, my time sheets are on carbon paper, and many workorders / receipts are on carbon paper
For once, this comment is appropriate.
Symbols are passed on and re-purposed all the time.
Just because the Medici family isn't all that these days doesn't mean the 3 balls aren't still the symbol for pawn broker.
Or what about that cross for Christianity? These modern day kids haven't seen any crucifixions lately. How will they relate? Might want to throw out Lady Justice and her scales along with the Caduceus while we are at it.
The bad ones will die off (voice mail is particularly unintuitive), the others live on just because they are distinctive. Abstract Square, not so much.
Where's the "And git off my lawn!" icon when you need it.
Table-ized A.I.
What the shit kind of haphazard article was this?
I can see how the fast pace of technological evolution can make other things seem glacial, but some of those things were a fucking stretch beyond measure.
Does he think we already live in a paperless society?
Because clipboards, manila folders, envelopes, and calendars all still exist and are commonplace.
And taking issue with binoculars and magnifying glasses? I guess as a technologically advanced people, we've replaced basic optics with what, psychic powers to conveniently amplify the size of things for our comprehension?
He goes on to make a statement about how they are confusing and whatnot (no they aren't, Sherlock Holmes used a magnifying glass to search for clues and shit), but how does that even deal with his preface of the article, which is about anachronism?
And I can see how the phone's silhouette is one that isn't QUITE the most modern thing... but honestly what would you update it with? A little metal rectangle to represent the candy-bar phones we have now? Honestly the next best thing is probably the Motorola-Brick, which is iconic as a cell-phone, but existed concurrently with those phone silhouettes anyway.
Other no-duh's include Studio mics (vs. what else would you use? A pinhole to represent the integrated mic in a webcam?), and who the fuck doesn't recognize a gear or a screwdriver as the innards of something?
And finally, regarding
I suspect my voicemail is no longer stored on spooled magnetic tape
given http://searchdatamanagement.rl.techtarget.co.uk/detail/RES/1320101138_161.html that article, I'm not so sure this guy even understands the world beyond just what he himself specifically sees and touches.
Basically, he tried to justify a full blown article based on his observation of: Floppies, and Radio Buttons.
What the article almost implies is that it's silly and outdated to represent today's abstract computing concepts with icons of physical items. What then, to represent them with? I agree that some of the items need to evolve to use more modern objects (e.g. the floppy disk). But when a visual representation is needed, almost by definition the visual needs to represent something either physical, or a widely accepted glyph (e.g. a question mark, or a star).
What would be a better icon for saving a file? How about a diagram of a function being called that opens an I/O api that causes the file system to start writing bits at a particular sector and track using a magnetic head? Oh wait, with SSD's that's already outdated. Ok, how about a pictogram of an SSD drive? Oh wait, it looks like a nondescript box with chips inside.
Perhaps Microsoft is actually onto the ultimate solution to all this: maybe icons themselves need to go. Maybe the UI should just say "Save".
The person that wrote this acts as if no one under 30 has ever seen any of these objects; to say so is completely ludicrous. I'm 28 and I have used floppy discs since I was 7, I've spoken on a telephone (over a cellphone) for most of my life, I've driven an older car with radio buttons, and I read books and like to keep my place. To assume anyone under 30 doesn't use tools, remember when polaroid went out of business, or owned a calendar is completely ignorant. Does everyone over 30 automatically have specific knowledge of these things? Does this make everyone under 30 completely ignorant to anything produced prior to the 1990s? Fuck off.
This is the most absurd news post I've read on Slashdot in a while. In fact, it's bad enough that I'm bothering to leave my first comment in nearly a decade.
The multitude of comments asserting that these metaphors are still valid are by-and-large correct. Of course, people have used floppy disks in ages, but who doesn't implicitly know what that icon means?
If an icon conveys intention, purpose, and shared understanding; it is effective.
What drivel.
The term is 'skeumorph' - it's like a wheel with decorative spokes. The wheel no longer needs them for strength, but they're there because a wheel 'needs' spokes.
The other obvious one is camera apps making a shutter sound.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph
This is nothing new. We still talk about pencil lead even though it's been graphite since Roman times, bands cutting new tracks though wax recording is long past, calculus though we don't count with stones, and dialing phones though the rotary phone is nearly extinct. "Pump the brakes" has enjoyed a renaissance of popularity as a slang phrase despite antilock brakes being universal, and people still go balls to the wall or run out of steam.
It's more important that these icons and idioms are standard and well-understood than that people remember their origins.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Most icons don't make sense, that's because they're NOUNS when they represent actions that are VERBS.
Let me give you a simple example, 'paste' is the act of pasting stuff into a document, yet its presented as a clipboard icon. Save, he covered the floppy disk, but even if it was a hard disk, the action is *saving* from memory to disk, yet the button shows the disk, not the act. It could equally apply to 'load' from disk since there's no arrow indicating the direction usually these days.
It gets worse when complex menu items are replaced by single icons, the menu might say "Do [this] to [that] using [tool-mode]" and that has to be condensed down to a single picture in a rectangle with no flow. Language flows left to right in English, things at the right occur later than things at the left, whereas in icons, everything is in a square and has no time flow.
This is why the Microsoft ribbon is so bad, all those icons trying to represent complex underlying actions and all of them vague and confusing.
So sure the out of date icons are bad, but then they were never good in the first place.
In a case of double-reverse-getoffmylawn-irony, the author is apparently too old to understand that Instagram icon is capitalizing on the very real nostalgia by hipster twenty-somethings for Polaroid cameras. This kind of retro-enthusiasm is very selective though. Recently I had a friend chastise another friend on why he would have an interest in vintage computers. Later that day, when visiting said friend's abode, I discovered an Atari 2600 configured with a SynthCart that allowed him to manipulate it as a retro-new-wave electronic instrument.
BTW... Thanks to Obama's bailout of the auto industry, wrenches and gears are still made use of 'under the hood' in more than a figurative sense... and it's still quite lucrative to do so.
Icons work because we have learned what the symbol means not because the symbol makes sense. Red Cross and the biohazard sign are examples of this.
If you change the symbol you have to learn everybody the meaning of the new symbol instead of just learning children the meaning of the old one.
Furthermore you don't have any guarantee that the shiny new symbol will be meaningful in a couple of years.
This is going to sound kind of mean, but tell them to adapt. You have perhaps a dozen icons to memorize that represent 90% of the operations you will ever need to perform on a computer; and there really aren't any viable replacements. Who uses Read / Write media today? What would be considered universal? A thumb drive? The 'cloud'? Who here owns a rewritable DVD, or Blu-Ray?
This is a problem that simply doesn't exist.
I am John Hurt.
TFS is misleading... the things you complain about are only complained about in aspects.
<karma-whoring>
Magnifying Glasses vs. Binoculars... he suggests that these icons should have been switched
Televisions... he complains about the "rabbit ears" aspect of many iconic renditions
The other two are just assuming that no one touches the tools anymore because they're not widely wielded anymore.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
The meaning of a symbol can extend way beyond the lifetime of the object it is based on.
In the UK the sign for a speed camera shows a Hasselblad-type bellows camera, not because these cameras are in common use, but because the symbol is highly-recognisable when travelling along a road at speed - much more so that a generic, rectangular digital camera symbol would be.
(Plus, with OSs like iOS, the concept of manually 'saving' a document is almost redundant - the average Joe is moving to systems where documents are simply created and then auto-magically sync'd to some central cloudy place)
I am bald
We maintain many symbols that don't make sense in a modern context anymore.
They're symbols. We use them because they mean something. They are as useful as they are easily understood. If due to these modern changes people no longer understand what the symbols mean, THEN they'll be bad. But so long as people know what they mean they're fine.
The objective is communication. That's the point of symbols. Until they're not understood they should remain unchanged. By all means, suggest alternatives and try to use them. But don't act like everyone else is doing the world a disservice by not following along.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Some companies are always slow to change, and others keep their icon up-to-date.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Sounds more like shrouded in ignorance to me...
Still, those of us who have lives in the real world do fine-tune things with a spanner etc, such as to give some more gain to the victa or level the fridge. So the notion of a spanner and screw-driver for configure (ie adjust), has still some sense. Also, there's the delightful phrase 'spanner in the works'. This is just the dandy place to do it (i recall one girl changing all of the window furniture to blue, and then wondered why she couldn't see anything!).
One should remember that the hard disk icon is sometimes shown as a stack of platters, and sometines as a grey box, but in one instance, the hard drive is not the volume, and secondly, not many people would pick out the fixed disks in a beige box. It's also interesting to see what people would think of floppy-disk icons when floppies aren't allowed at work.
Still, there are steam engines used to show level crossings, because of all things railway, the steam engine is perfectly recognisable.
As to the rabbit ears on the tele, that's about the most distinct thing about it, and even TiVo uses it in their logo.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Radio buttons don't resemble physical radio buttons that much. I'm 22 years old college student and part-time software developer. Before this article I indeed hadn't known why they're called radio buttons in the first place (I assumed that only one being enabled at a time was a reference to radio playing one channel at a time... or something. I have distant memory of having pondered that briefly in my teens but I didn't care enough to find out)... but I've never found them confusing because of that. You have a set of options and when you choose one, all the others are deactivated... you don't need to think about physical buttons on a radio to understand the concept. I guess you could say "We could just change the term" but I honestly don't see why... or what we would change it to.
A guy who, at least based on his bio, isn't particularly young, and who works as a Principal Program Manager for that stodgy old tech company Microsoft - this is the guy who's talking about "old people icons"?
Yeah, he sounds like he's on the cutting edge of stuff.
#DeleteChrome
You don't think your medical records are stored on vinyl discs, surely?
Dude, how do you think I feel? I'm 37...
Who knows the origin of the alphabet.....nobody....who cares. But imagine the chaos if we changed it. Go get a real job.
Another problem I've complained about in the past is rebus icons. I once used a source control system where the icon to commit a change had a document page with a tick mark and an arrow pointing at the page. I'd been using it for several years before I realized what it was supposed to represent - Americans call a tick mark a 'check', so this was the 'document check-in' button. At which point I also realized the same applied to an email client which had an icon with an ticked envelope - 'check mail'.
So, icons were supposed to be language independent, but instead in these examples they only made sense in one particular dialect.
I also have a problem with Swedish appliances (washing machines, ovens) which have indecypherable icons for the various modes, and the manual has invariably been lost years ago. If they just labeled the modes in Swedish, at least I'd be able to look up the meanings online.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
> Wrenches and Gears - Setup/Settings
> Want to indicate Settings or Setup to a twenty something? Show them a tool they've never used in their lives.
Do you really think "twenty-somethings" are so ignorant they don't know what a wrench or a gear is?
> If you don't know who Johnny Carson is, how could you know that this is a old-style microphone?
Because the same style of microphone is still used in recording studios and radio stations all over the world, including a lot of places where no one has ever heard of Johnny Whoever...?
> Soon the envelope itself will go away and the next generation will wonder what this rectangle means and what it has to do with email.
The envelope isn't going anywhere soon, and people will simply recognize it as "the symbol for mail". What does a small arrow have to do with playing movies? What do two vertical bars have to do with pausing something? What does a little cross have to do with adding numbers? What does a hook shape with a dot at the bottom have to do with questions? What does each letter's shape have to do with its sound or its meaning?
Whoever wrote this article seems to think that icons must somehow be identical to the things they represent...
Seriously, half the items in that list are still in use today. Manilla folders, binoculars, envelopes, televisions, cameras, bookmarks...
The floppy disk is the only really outdated thing in that list! And it's become so iconic that changing it now would be pointless.
Wow, I'm only 21 and yet this is making me feel old.
You have to have SOME icon for things, there is no reason to change it arbitrarily to shit nobody understands. People know that the calendar icon gets you, well a calendar even if they've never seen a real calendar.
Then as you point out most of them are not at all archaic. Manila folders still dominate filing cabinets at businesses, TVs don't look like they did in the 50s, but TVs are still everywhere and not dropping in numbers. Wrenches are same as they ever were and if you own a house, you either have a wrench or will have one soon enough.
This was just an article written by some moronic 19 year old hipster who has fuck-all experience with the world. "Oh these are things I've never seen in Starbucks or my philosophy 101 classroom, clearly they are obsolete!"
Also, funny enough, companies do update their iconography. Like in Windows it uses an icon that looks like a widescreen LCD HDTV to represent a TV (for things like HDMI outs in the sound panel or the like). They do generally modernize the look as time goes on.
However ultimately it doesn't matter. If we recognize the icon as meaning something, we will continue to. Hell take a look at the icon for Steam. It is a black background with a strange white joint on it. It is just the logo Valve made for Steam. I don't know what it is supposed to represent, if anything. Doesn't matter, I instantly recognize it and my brain says "That is Steam." Same shit with any other icon.
Punched paper tape. Punched cards. Core memory. Teletypes. Vacuum tubes. TV dinners in aluminum trays covered with aluminum foil. Mechanical calculators. 78 RPM records.
I'm 63. You kids get the hell off my lawn and take your damned revisionist icons with you. The $ sign has been good for 150 years and I'll be damned if you want to screw with it. Take my floppy from my cold, dead hands I say. Whimper. Leave Gramps to die in peace, you whippersnappers with your iPads and clouds.
Actually, modern interfaces are confusing as hell because user interface design has become so screwed up. When you use Gmail, some functions cannot be found, do not appear, until you're in the right region with the cursor and in the right mode of operation. It is confusing as hell when every new app uses it's own damned UI scheme created by a slacker who likes videogames and puzzles. So those who complain about the obsolescence of icons, how about creating usable software instead of complaining. And now again: lawn, off. Now.
You talk about the $ sign. *I* remember when it had TWO vertical bars. Lazy 60 year olds.
rewriting history since 2109
I still don't understand why we have to "Save" documents in today's computer age.
I still don't understand why my super-complex nth-generation Office software still asks me if I want to "Save or Discard Changes" when I quit, without showing me what has changed in the document. (You might get a hint from the Undo drop-down, but that's a clumsy work-around, and doesn't work while the "Save/Discard" pop-up is showing.) Even the standard wiki text editors can do that, yet not one stand-alone program I've ever seen can show my what has changed between my saved and unsaved versions.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I had a chuckle a couple of days ago when I saw the VirtualBox "Clone" menu icon to be a sheep.
But seriously, this list?
Yes some things come and go... and some things are cultural (like the mailbox icon for mail) and over years some will change. But like some words that still retain their meaning 100 years after their technology stopped being used, I suspect that some icons will still be used for a long time.
I think he's misunderstood the meaning of "symbol", which is after all not a literal representation of what it's depicting. If you have a problem with a Floppy Disk symbol because the current generation hasn't seen one (did the past suddenly disappear? Did we collectively stop recording history?) then what about the letter "A"? Originally it represented the Head of an Ox. I'm guessing that more people reading this have seen a floppy disk than have seen an ox.
Agreed, there was nothing that required the floppy icon to mean Save and not Open. (Or even File-Manager. Click on the disk to view what's on the disk, wouldn't that make sense?)
What the icons mean is mostly arbitrary. But like the controls on cars, once the manufacturers standardised, it meant anyone who could drive, could quickly adapt to any new model. The current trend towards highly generic mono outline icons, different in nearly every program even on the same platform, is completely counter-productive.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Or maybe by a "carriage return" followed by a "line feed." You see, the text I am writing, and that you are reading, is written in ASCII which is based on the Model 33 Teletype. On a Teletype, a carriage return character (0x0D) would cause the print head to travel all the way to the left; a line feed (0x0A) would cause a roll of paper to move vertically upward by one line.
The modern experience of "going online" is derived from the fact that the Model 33 Teletype had a rotary switch that controlled an electric motor. This switch had three positions, "Line," "Off, and "Local." At my high school, one prepared computer programs in BASIC using "Local" mode so that the program could be punched onto paper tape, one character at a time, while the Teletype was disconnected from the computer system.
Use of computer systems had to be paid for according to the amount of time used, measured in seconds or even milliseconds. Computer time was then too expensive for a user to be allowed to sit at the Teletype keyboard and manually enter keystrokes; instead, after the entire program was punched onto paper tape, the switch would be turned to the "Line" position and the paper tape reader would cause the program to be transmitted to the computer at the Teletype's maximum speed of 110 baud. This was known as "going on Line."
Early microcomputer systems, like larger computers, used Teletypes as I/O devices and ASCII was used internally to store and interpret alphanumeric data. This continued long after users migrated from Teletypes to video display terminals, e.g. DEC VT-100, and then to the IBM PC as the I/O device of choice. Many special function keys from the Model 33 remain in use to this day, for example the Esc (0x1B), Ctrl, Backspace (0x08), Tab (0x09) and DEL (0x7F) keys. The DEL (Delete) code is 0x7F because hitting DEL would cause all the holes in that row of paper tape to be punched (get it, 0x7F). So if you made a typing mistake you could back up the paper tape by one character and type DEL, this would punch through your errant character and the computer would ignore the DEL character.
$ sign is still used in a meaning of money or profit, while it should mean debt.
Next week we'll examine the outdated gestures like the handshake and the military salute.
Jeesh, do kids born after 1500 even know what these things mean?!
Of course the reason is I18N. My Japanese satnav has little buttons which were obviously originally designed to hold Japanese symbols. The English version just about works, with words like "Route" and "Guide". The French and German options are simply full of abbreviations.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Manila folders and files aren't going away. There's quite a bit of paper on my desk at any given time and when I'm done with it I either toss it or file it away in a drawer of my desk. And when I give a stack of paper to someone else to read and comment on I use, gasp, manila folders. Where does this guy work? Or, more generally: How can people function without the convenience of pen and paper?
While I am not able to remember when I last saw a floppy disk icon I appreciate and identify with your insatiable thirst for cherry picking and hyperbole.
Radio buttons... Thanks for the education. I never gave it a second thought or made that connection because like yourself I'm a fucking idiot. Speaking of connections how does this label count as an icon that "does not make sense" anymore? What icon? And since when the hell do non-programmers (using term very loosly) even know radio buttons are called radio buttons anyway?
'No, books didn't "keep our place when we turned them off."' Personally I use old movie tickets as bookmarks while debugging my punch cards.
"I use folders because I use the 43 Folders organizational system"
You admit even you use folders and yet this still makes your list of 14 icons that don't make sense anymore. Why is your nonsense even on slashdot? How much moola did it take to get ./ to sell its soul? Why am I wasting my time replying to this? I suspect its cause we're both fucking idiots.
"The world's most advanced phones include an icon that looks like a phone handset that you haven't touched in 20 years, unless you've used a pay phone recently."
What you really meant to say was "I have not had a job in 20 years"
"Soon the envelope itself will go away and the next generation will wonder what this rectangle means and what it has to do with email. "
Hate to break it to ya snail mail aint not going nowhere anytime soon. I'm drawn like a bug to headlights to origional point of this exercise.. "14 other old people icons that don't make sense anymore". I understand you may think the flux capacitor you ordered off ebay was sold as a "prop" only to cover for its amazing properties just as the xbox360 "box only" I ordered contained an actual xbox360.
"If you don't know who Johnny Carson is, how could you know that this is a old-style microphone?"
I know right cause if you like google "usb microphone" only modern futurastic usb era microphones appear and they look NOTHING like that icon.
"Want to indicate Settings or Setup to a twenty something? Show them a tool they've never used in their lives."
Now your just being rude and condescending. What I might have said previously in humor I mean sincerely now "FUCK YOU".
"No one under 30 has seen a Polaroid in years but we keep using them for icons. Instagram sold for $1B with an icon whose subtlety was lost on its target audience"
Ok so your under 30... now lets see if we can narrow the field with our "binoculars"... 12? 11?.. close?
That instagram icon does not show any slots with pictures coming out of it. In fact it does not even remotly resemble a real polariod camera at all. The only resembelence I see is a misplaced iconic rainbow stripe. It actually resembles a nondescript film camera. Instagram uses such icons because nostalgia is the whole fucking point of instagram.
As long as there still is DRM, the printed book certainly won't disappear, except in the homes of a bunch of idiots who will be left without those DRMed files after a few years.
Postal mail still is essential to businesses as most of their workflows are paper based. In your usual company you have some computer system printing out some information on a sheet of paper. With e-mail you would have to scan that printout in before you can attach it, a process even harder than generating PDF files directly which is, if technically possible at all, quite difficult.
Diskettes may have died out in the world of web-design, but when it comes to manufacturing, many companies are stuck with some 1990s $100k piece of machinery getting its data via diskette only. In fact, every PC case I bought over the last few years still had a slot for a 5 1/4 inch diskette drive. They often even lack one of the front panels so you have to install it. Otherwise you'd have an empty space in your front.
Those things may all have long been gone in certain areas, but in the real world it's nothing like that.
That describes our alphabet, numbers, and other writing glyphs rather well, doesn't it? If glyphs created within the past 50 years are already bosolete and need to be changed, then our alphabet must be desperately in need of the same, no?
This is exactly why it is beyond comprehension that Apple, of all companies I might add, has introduced the faux-leather calendar and the address book that looks like a paper book in Lion. After they spent several iterations of OS X to arrive at the beautiful uniform sleek look of Snow Leopard WHY did they regress to using a real world metaphor that makes no sense to half their users?
options: gears/wrenches --> a yellow triangle (caution sign) with an exclamation point in it with a little red X instead of a "point"
saving: floppy disk --> anatomical brain
video entertainment programming: TV --> MTV
calendar: calendar --> christmas present
folders: manila envelope --> kitten and yarn-ball /or/ matrushka doll
take a picture: aperture camera --> breasts with penis
save my place: bookmarks --> treasure map
remember this person: rolodex / blackbook --> spy silhouette
cut/paste: clipboards --> open mouths
"wait": hourglass --> rotating spiral
on-disk search: eyeglass --> hourglass
in-file search: binoculars --> cop
send functions: postage envelopes --> globe
copies: carbon copy flyaway --> tiers of identically dogeared pages
new RadioButton --> new Selector(exclusive)
new CheckBox --> new Selector(inclusive)
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
OT but pumping the brakes is not what people used to do before anti-lock brakes. Pumping the brakes is what you do when the brake system hydraulics are failing, and you need to build up fluid and pressure in the line so the pedal doesn't hit the floor when you want to stop. Pumping the brakes was made a thing of the past by dual brake system circuits. Not anti-lock brakes.
Kurt
Replacing every icon with a smart phone would be very confusing.
Sometimes you read stories about people who think you can swim under continents or that USA is the only country or Jesus spoke English or whatever other subject someone found to show how stupid people can be. The person who wrote the Icon article is so stupid he went and wrote an article on himself about stupid people.
Does this person think that a box with an arrow out of the bottom indicated a trap door up ahead? I certainly wouldn't be looking for a trapdoor for a way out of a building, no telling what you might fall into. Mind you, the entrance is even worse! Why is there no sign to the stairs so I can get on top of the building so I can drop down into it?
Ages ago, Seinfeld did a routine in which he ridiculed how airplanes have to fly a certain speed as if there are speed limits up there around airports or something... well yes you stupid moronic idiot, how can anyone be so fucking retarded as to think that airplanes lining up for approach one behind the other can fly whatever speed they want. Since he did this early on, I never caught the Seinfeld craze, to me he was always just a really stupid retard who made jokes for stupid people. Real humor is done by really smart people who point out the funny stuff in life, not how ignorant they are of the in ability for aircraft to fly through each other while landing.
Cars used to come with keys and these keys were inserted into the ignition and then turned to start the car and turned again to turn the car off. This was so common that everyone just assumed this was the way things are done. Cue some retarded engineer who thought he could do things differently, added a start button that then has to be hold for 5-30 seconds depending on how insane the engineer is. Cue people dying because they can't figure out in a panic how to turn the engine off. We use icons and standardized methods because people know them so they can use them without having to think.
Another famous example is for web developers, the humble shopping cart icon. Some designers think it is funny to mess with this and voila, people can't find it. Your business might have a basket like product that is oh so funny to use as a shopping cart but your customers don't make the connection because they don't do their shopping in a dog-sled. (Example from some UI design book).
And gosh, do you know how can tell a true idiot who tries to look clever by pointing out where he doesn't get how the world works? He totally fails to think through his own complaints and solutions.
The Floppy disk icon for saving. First off, I checked. Not a SINGLE application I use actually has such an icon. Not a one. Most use simple text in a menu and are designed for people who use CTRL-S. Some other idiot above wonders why you even need to save manually when you exit an application. BECAUSE YOU FREAKING WASTE OF SPACE, THE FUCKING APPLICATION CAN'T READ THE DISEASED ROTTING MASS YOU CALL A BRAIN. You might NOT want to save the waste of bits you call work. God knows nobody else does.
The brainiacs suggestion as an alternative? A cloud icon. WHOOO! Because what if I am not saving to the cloud? Anyway, from Amazon's robust performance I am not entirely convinced they are not saving their files to a big stack of floppies.
Next up, radio buttons... does he think they are icons? Apparently... how the fuck is a user dumb enough not to know single select buttons in physical form going to know these UI elements are called radio buttons? Or indeed care, such a person is to busy trying to convince rent-o-kill to come fix his mouse problem.
Clipboards... he shows exactly where almost everyone will still see these in daily use. He doesn't even bother coming up with an alternative, because no alternative would make sense. What next, a pair of scissors for cut is wrong to? WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU SUGGEST INSTEAD?
I will skip a few because my rage level is getting out of control.
The world's most advanced phones include an icon that looks like a phone handset that you haven't touched i
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Seriously, 20 somethings haven't used a screw driver or or wrench? Instragram was made by young people largely for young people. Hipsters certainly know what a polaroid is. It's the thing that gives them wet dreams.
It's very easy to sit there, assume every young person is an idiot and moan about icons using "out dated" imagery to describe their purpose but why no try and propose something better and more modern? I suspect it's not easy at all which is why it's easy to find people that moan about these icons but no one who can propose something better.
We have centuries of information to reference. Assuming no one has seen these things and everyone just works with computers and electronic devices but that's not true. We still sell piles of calendars. We still use folders, pencils and cameras with lenses and we still use phones with handsets. Perhaps not every single person does but they've no gone away.
I agree, interface design has gone completely titsup. I've been playing Battlefield Bad Company 2 lately, and its amazing how badly that interface is/works. Some buttons have double functions but the same name, which doesnt make sense for both conditions, for example closing the application is beneath the 'exit game' button, which is fine. But when you are connected to a server it disconnects you but doesnt close the game. yet it looks the same but doesnt work as expected. Also note that many interface elements have orange bars that resemble buttons. But not all of them, some of them dont function when you click on them. You also have 2 ways of browsing for servers, both through a unique button in the main screen but how you browse is still slightly different, one of them is rundant.
Anyway, screenshots explain this way better. Its just something that has been itching me whilst playing and made me realize that a set of complete idiots designed the interface without putting any though into it.
What's wrong with Auto-save
In theory, a program could add a revision for every keystroke. But if you want to revert to a previous revision, it'd be tedious to find the right revision that way. In addition, it'd need to keep the hard drive spinning all the time to store all the diffs in case of power failure. Even in an application with automatic saving, the "save" button still has a purpose, namely to mark a revision as worth keeping.
We use symbols to represent actions or things as a way of communicating; even if the original meaning is lost to antiquity the symbols is not so it's still an effective tool. Replacing it with more modern designs merely means people have to relearn what they mean even though they have an already effective set in broad use.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Microphones? editor, are you just fucking high?
Ironically, in Soviet Russia, vinyl discs were made of medical records!
No really, they were. It's not a joke.
Outside the sphere of IT, two that make me laugh are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatter_Telephone
Our 1-year-old boy has one of these, though he has never seen a rotary phone. He doesn't get it at all. However, we've given him an old Nokia mobile phone handset with the battery removed and he often puts it to his ear to make a call (as he also does with remote controls or anything that kind of shape.)
Also, the UK road sign for an ungated railway level crossing is a picture of a steam locomotive.
http://www.driving-test-success.com/driving-articles/level-crossings.htm
Use words.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The only icon there that is questionable is the floppy disk. All the other icons represent things that are still very much in use by people who aren't unemployed parent's-basement dwelling troggs.
The $ sign may come from the Hercules Columns:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Columnas_Plus_Ultra.png?uselang=es
Part of the Spanish heraldics.
Just for the record: I've seen plenty of apps (especiallly from those morons in the "computer-based training" business) where the little buttons that are empty circles until you click them to select turn out to be exclusive for one page, and then nonexclusive on the next. "Exclusive" is a true radio button, in that only one can be selected-- clicking one turns the last selection "off" -- and nonexclusive means you can do the infamous "A only -- B only -- A and C -- A and B " answer selection. So basically, as a couple posters pointed out, failure to standardize the meaning and function of an icon is the problem, not the icon itself.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Icons are just symbols. They don't have to actually look like what they represent, particularly when it is an action. What about those red octagons or yellow triangles at intersections. They don't look like anything they represent and yet they work quite well.
This is typical stupidity - it doesn't matter what the icon refers to, what matters is if people understand what it does. Everybody knows what the current ones mean, and new people getting introduced to a computer learn what they mean. If you suddenly start changing that you will confuse everybody already in computers for no valid reason.
Its like when they started with that kibi byte nonsense.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
This is a bit of a pedantic point but I'm going to make it anyway. It's not that the icons "don't make sense anymore" it's that they origins of the metaphorical meaning are lost. The floppy disk icon still means save to the newer generations they just don't know why it means save. Words and language work the same way and we regularly lose the etymologies of words to time.
The metaphor was important when we were teaching a generation of people to intuitively use a complex machine that they had no internal context for, that is the general purpose computer. To that end designing a UI around metaphors that these people were comfortable with (e.g. file cabinets) was important to make the learning curve less steep. The newer generations have grown up from childhood with these devices so the metaphor is orders of magnitude less important as they learn these interfaces as they learn any contexts that could otherwise be used as a metaphor. It doesn't mean that the interface couldn't be made better or more intuitive (e.g. phone touch screens) but the idea that the icons "don't make sense" is really inaccurate they just no longer hold the special contextual meaning they did for a group of people trying to understand a new device they didn't grow up around.
I wonder what the definition of old is for "Old people are the only ones who need icons to map directly to physical objects" poster, the gui environment with icons was introduced to the masses less than 25 years ago (for examples, windows 3 was released in may/1990). There are older gui environments but the availability was limited.
I am willing to bet though, that as long as documents need to be saved, and the user is working in a gui, that the floppy disk icon will be used. There will be no compelling reason to replace the icon as the majority of users understand what it represents.
By the way, does anyone know why most stop signs are red and are octagonal in shape?
... TFA begs the question -- why do we consider any icons make sense? Aren't they just abandoning the invention of the alphabet and reverting to earlier pictographs?
Cute article but largely exaggerated. The floppy disk is surely obsolete as is the voicemail icon which I think really is depicting the cassette in the old answering machines. But most of those other items are either in current use (just walk through Staples to see clipboards and all sorts of envelopes) or pretty recognizable from exposure in films or other media. I mean, most people have probably not seen a horse and buggy in real life but would still easily recognize it.
$ is [...] used for strings in BASIC.
$ is obviously short for 'soft'.
And the reason it means "soft" is as an allusion to Microsoft's beginning as a publisher of 8-bit BASIC interpreters.
The other obvious one is camera apps making a shutter sound.
That's to let the subject know that she is being photographed. Some jurisdictions actually mandate it after the news made a big thing of clandestine panty shots.
We get a nested obscurity with Manila folders. How many people of the generation that started using Manila folders as icons every made a folder from abaca or even knew why the folders were called that?
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Actually the Phoenician word for ox, they original symbol looked something like an ox head.
When was the last time anyone ever met a Phoenician? How many people in industrialized countries work with oxen on a daily basis?
Maybe we should replace "A" with something more current and trendy.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
I once used a source control system where the icon to commit a change had a document page with a tick mark and an arrow pointing at the page. I'd been using it for several years before I realized what it was supposed to represent
It's not necessarily rebus. A tick mark represents approval. When you commit a revision, you are approving the changes made in that revision. Where else do you think the term "check in" came from?
At which point I also realized the same applied to an email client which had an icon with an ticked envelope - 'check mail'.
That, on the other hand, is a clearer example of the rebus problem you speak of. The "check" here means to poll for new messages, not to express approval, and a tick mark makes no sense.
So, icons were supposed to be language independent
Even the tick mark for approval is language dependent. Japanese, for example, more often uses an O for approval and an X for failure.
I also have a problem with Swedish appliances (washing machines, ovens) which have indecypherable icons for the various modes, and the manual has invariably been lost years ago. If they just labeled the modes in Swedish, at least I'd be able to look up the meanings online.
Anything made before about 2000, when web-based machine translation services became well known, didn't anticipate the ability to translate Swedish. Perhaps there's a common set of logograms used on European appliances that are just not well known outside Europe.
The icon means what the accompanying text says it means. No accompanying text? That's a UI design error because on their own nearly all tiny thumbnail pictures are about as clear as mud.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Back in the dark ages (1980's) IBM mainframe terminals used an analog clock face as the "wait" icon. When Windows came along the hour glass became very popular for pretty much the same thing. I would think that more people in the 1980's knew what an analog clock face was than an hour glass. If you really want some fun with icon images try some of the less mainstream software -- Eagle CAD for circuit board design comes to mind.
What makes you think 20 somethings have never seen a screwdriver or a wrench? Those are still common tools that a normal person would be expected to be familiar with.
Absolutely correct. If you say our icons need to be updated, I say you (or your kids) need a history lesson. Convention exists for a reason, and if you're going to do things differently, it needs to be better for everyone.
The basic point of the article ("Some Icons have outdated images on them! ") has been done numerous times before. But like most articles of the type, it never really address the actual problem and just stops at a Seinfeldesque, "Flopp icons, what's up with that!?"
Icons need to be pictures that are very easy to identify despite being very small, and still give a ready menmonic suggestion as to their use. Everyone knows that a floppy is an outdated image for a save icon. The problem is that no one can really come up with a good replacement. So why don't you suggest one, Scott Hanselman?
Emacs FTW!! :D (old farts will know what I mean.)
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Text only doesn't make sense! Lets say you were from the USA (where knowledge of foreign languages is seen to be bad in some states) and you visit a foreign country (say France). You have to use one of their computers and everything was in French (surprise!). You couldn't use it effectively without icons. With icons you could have a familiar frame of reference to do things. At least you would be better off than with text (French) only!
I'm probably a decent subject for a "do the damn kids even know what this stuff is anymore?" experiment - I graduate college in a few weeks. I know, I know, that's a hell of a selection bias right from the start, but let's go with it.
Simple test: go through my smartphone, see if I can ID every icon's source on one particular screen.
First, the phone itself has a handful of icons. There's an arrow pointing backwards for the general "back/undo" button, a series of lines (with the top extended to the left) for "details/menu", a house for "home page", and a magnifying glass for "search". The first two will never really fail, since they were abstract from the start. Houses still have walls, a floor and a roof, although chimneys may be inexplicable in a few generations. Magnifying glasses are still seen at least on TV, where they're heavily associated with "detectives", making "search" a logical connection. Finally, next to the power button are two logos: a vertical line enclosed in a circle, and a padlock. The former has always mystified me, but is widely-used to mean "power device on/off" (usually, but not always, the circle is broken at the top). The latter, however, is still common enough a sight.
Next icons are on the notifications bar. First one of those is "unread voicemails", which I can recognize as an old cassette tape, although I definitely associate that more with its icon use than its physical use, and I will concede that some people my age may never have used one. Then is a square with a triangle in it, indicating that the media player is playing, which is pretty much a purely abstract icon. Then are two different sets of bars for Wifi and mobile status, again purely abstract AFAIK.
Then there's a little image of the phone surrounding by motion lines, indicating "vibrate mode". Since it looks pretty much like the actual device, I can definitely recognize it. Then there's a battery life indicator, and yes, we do know what AAs are. Last notification icon's the "hardest" - an alarm clock, looking like the traditional round analog clocks with the bells on top. I no longer actually use a dedicated alarm clock - I use this phone instead, but the concept of "a distinct device used for keeping time and playing alarms as specified" is not alien to me. Although I never owned an alarm clock shaped like that, I can recognize the round analog "clock", and from there, even without seeing it a million times in pop culture, I could derive "alarm clock" from that.
The main screen has more icons. There's a plain, old-fashioned computer monitor for my terminal-emulator app, a piece of paper and pencil for my text editor app, a spiral-bound calendar for the calendar app, a set of arithmetic symbols on buttons for my calculator app, and so on. The only ones that someone my age may not recognize are:
* the old-style red/blue 3D goggles for the "Google Goggles" app
* the index-card thing for the Contacts app
* the globe icon for the web browser - nobody calls it the "World Wide Web" anymore, so the connection between "world" and "internet" is now a rather loose one.
* and fine, I'll go ahead and list the chess board and knights from my chess app, since I know half the people my age never learned to play chess
Just as a note, on my phone, at least, "Settings" uses a dial, not a set of gears or a wrench. This arguably makes far more sense - a dial is used to change a setting, while gears are what makes something actually work, and a wrench is more used for "assembly" than "configuration".
There's also a few icons that are *new* and still meaningless - can someone explain the Bluetooth logo?
Let's go into one app and see what icons are in *it*. For this experiment, lets try the media player app.
Well, there's a "series of bulleted items" that brings me to the current playlist. Logical. There's two different arrow-based icons for "random" and "repeat", which are also self-explanatory provided you know how abstract arrows work (aside: does anyone know if these abstract ar
The trend to lower dpi is why I am typing this from a 5 year old Dell, I can't buy a replacement laptop today with the same resolution (1920x1200) for my budget of $1200 (what this one cost). Soon my phone will have more pixels than my laptop!
Fact: The standards, Unicode in particular, do not specify one or two lines in the "currency symbol". That is left to the font to decide.
I learned this while setting up a currency database. Apparently Brazil (I think it was Brazil) uses the double-barred symbol for *their* currency, and the single-barred for "US Dollars", which are also in relatively common use. Pretty decent idea for distinguishing currencies, IMO - is sure beats US$ vs CA$, or using ISO 4217 codes.
That reminds me of a time in high school when we "gained access" to the "computer room" (a teletype in a closet), formed a 2' loop of paper tape with LF chars, and make prank teletype calls around town.
Ah, the things we would think of before the Internet.
But I'm old. My first technical job was as an engineer at the local radio station. The AP wire was an actual current loop that feed Baudot to a electro-mechanical printer. (77 baud.)
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
No shit.
sic transit gloria mundi
Seriously, who the f**k doesn't know about wrenches, binoculars, cameras, microphones, magnifying glasses, handset phones, bookmarks, clipboards, and TVs?
Anybody who lives in the real world, and especially has ever been in an office (include manilla folders here) has seen all of these things still very much in common use.
Every office I've ever been in has handset desk phones, even if they are VOIP, and manilla folders are quite common there, and in the home for those who need to keep paperwork around (any grownup living in this world).
Binoculars - Really?????? Who thinks those aren't used anymore? What do you think is replacing them?
Cameras - Seriously?? Photography is more popular now than ever, with REAL SLRs. Just look around. Envelopes - can't avoid those even if you try; even if you do all your banking and bill-paying online (and some services still aren't there yet) everyone gets greeting cards and junk mail.
Talk to anyone who ever has to fix anything ever about how wrenches are obsolete. Please do so at a construction site or mechanic shop. Watch hilarity ensue.
You could make a point about floppies, carbons, MAYBE blueprints (though I still see those used in Facility departments), but the other items? Whose the clueless hipster douchebag who wrote this drivel?
(I know a guy like that who says watches are obsolete - he just looks at his cell phone. Rather than take my phone out, I simply glance at my wrist, taking a tiny fraction of the time/effort he takes. Yeah, he's smart.)
We apologize for the inconvenience.
This article makes no sense.
What difference does it make what little picture you click on to get something to happen as long as you know what it means. If you don't know what it means, well, that's what documentation is for. Everyone knows that the current icons mean. What does it matter if a 14 year old has never seen a floppy disk as long as he knows that image means "save"?
If someone were to suddenly change the save icon to a 3D box being hit by a lightning bolt (simply because he liked lightning) no one would know what it meant until they were told, or they look it up.Ten years later everyone knows that means save but no one will remember where it came from. What does it matter as long as the work still gets done?
Not many people in the US use blacksmiths anymore, but because large portions of the population play RPGs (either electronic or paper & pencil) most everyone knows that an anvil is usually the symbol for blacksmith. So what difference does it make?
And finding old revisions could be as simple as scrubbing back through a history bar like watching a video.
It appears you're talking about permanent storage of arbitrarily detailed revision history of every document. However, this may create a bit of confusion as to the nature of "the document". If you e-mail "a document" to someone else, are you e-mailing a specific revision or the entire revision history? If you copy "a document" to an external drive, are you copying a specific revision or the entire revision history? If both operations are available, how do you communicate the difference between these to the user through the GUI? I seem to remember international news stories about information being leaked through Word documents that come with some of their revision history.
... judging from the comments I see there.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
How would saving a transcript of the entire revision history of every document on your machine work efficiently in the case of (say) a paint program, in which each brush stroke carries a lot of information? You're looking at X displacement, Y displacement, and possibly pressure, 60 times a second while the mouse or pen is down.
And I'm sure that there are good examples of icons that don't make sense anymore, but this article was just.. wrong? The guy who wrote this is trying to be ahead of the game but he's an idiot. I'll start off by mentioning I'm 17 because age is important here.
I know what an address book is, I don't use one but I'm in possession of multiple because who knows why. I use bookmarks every day. I've never seen the voicemail icon before but I know what a voicemail machine is we used one on my home phone when I was younger. Um manila folders? Haha what the fuck? I'm not even gonna say anything about that.
Home phone. Okay yeah eventually those might die out but most everyone has them right now. Everyone definitely know what they are whether or not they use them much. I don't touch mine, but they're more uniformly designed than cell phones so they make more sense as an icon. Sure magnifying glass/binoculars are true but not relevant to the title. Envelopes? Pretty sure I know about those things. Also I'm pretty sure every 20 year old knows what a screwdriver is. I'm pretty sure every 4 year old knows what a screwdriver is. In fact, I'm pretty sure that will always be true for a very long time because I see no reason that the screwdriver won't be around in 100 years. It's simple and it works. Then it says that the microphone is an "old stlye microphone." Not only would anyone recognize that, that's not an "old style microphone." I record music, I have multiple microphones that look like that. That's not outdated they still make microphones that.. have stands and are rounded? Why wouldn't they? Polaroids? You're 10 years off. I mean sure they're rare now but everyone knows what they are. Even if you didn't, it'd just look like a photograph so the icon would still make sense. No my TV doesn't have rabbit ears but I have friends whose TVs do, even if I'd never seen one before it still looks like a TV so it makes sense. Carbon copies? I've made carbon copies. I also know what a blueprint is, I've made blueprints in high school in tech classes. Never seen carbon copies used as an icon before I guess it's used as a term in emails but that's not necessarily an icon.
Basically what I'm saying is this article was a load of crap.
Nice. Had forgotten much of it. We used a surplus teletype through a bread-boarded interface to our recently completed Altair... worked fine, circa '79.
It's a good question. Perhaps each file could have a separate history file. If you copy the history of that document along with the document, someone could scrub through your edit history. Most of the time, you're going to be sending only the latest revision. However, the history file could include a marker designating where in your history the document was closed (or currently open to) and allow you to send a prior version. It should be fairly transparent to the average user, but I have no problem letting someone advanced pop open a dialog allowing them to send any arbitrary revision. (In fact, I encourage apps have "advanced" options for those that really dig into the application itself.)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
You forgot the @ sign, today probably even more widespread than the ampersand.
We're not even sure where does it come from, but it doesn't look to me that we stopped using it.
Actually I've had a handset for a year, because VoIP is offered with virtually no added cost. But I had some pioneering offer from the ISP, now more and more widespread, where voice calls to mobile phones are already included in my internet bill (36 EUR per month). So I can call them for free! it even works properly now that I've increased sensibility on the ISP box's web interface. People couldn't fucking hear me before.
The handset is comfortable enough (it's a piece of crap I picked up somewhere), is a useful back up in case of cell phone failure or loss, and I can give the land phone number to people I wouldn't want to have my cell phone number. A win-win-win situation.
In a professionnal or community setting, you can connect an old handset to a computer or a VoIP box, and rent a SIP "line" for one euro per month. or outright buy an IP phone which comes with, you guessed it, a real handset. Everyone in your company gets a desk phone with a real phone number, for a total cost similar to what one land line used to cost. Oh, and in the far future it's probable you could just pick up any handset regardless of who it belongs to and use it with one of your personal identities.
Emacs? Pshaw I say! You and your fancy python bindings and X-integration... it's all a bunch of useless modern folderol! Pshaw again!
vi at holds closer to it's respectable ed antecedents, but I don't hold much truck with that "new vi" nonsense.
When -we- used to program you had to carry your case of hand-punched cards to the datacenter... in the snow... uphill... BOTH WAYS.
Dang fools come around talking up emacs and taking on airs... don't rightly got no sense in their heads.
The save button itself should have been deprecated years ago. Documents and files should have been saved automatically and stored in a searchable manner. The whole idea of storing "files" in "folders" is so 1970's. Alan Cooper said as much back in 1995 ( http://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interface-Design/dp/1568843224 ), but only in the last couple years have OSs even attempted something like this (Lion's Universal Autosave feature), and even they don't do it terribly well.
Just to continue this thread, it's been said that the original Emacs was written in TECO, the DEC-10 editor, which also had full access to the operating system's deepest function calls. TECO makes Emacs look like a paragon of user interface perfection. IIRC one of the TECO commands was 'delete line', and the upper case version of the same command was 'reboot' - a rather brute force method of deleting a line.
For those inquiring minds, Here's the link. A quote might be sufficient:
TECO does not really have syntax; each character in a program is an imperative command, dispatched to its corresponding routine. That routine may read further characters from the program stream (giving the effect of string arguments), change the position of the 'program counter' (giving the effect of control structures), or push values onto a value stack (giving the effect of nested parentheses). But there is nothing to prevent operations like jumping into the middle of a comment, since there is no syntax and no parsing.
A classic essay on computer programming, Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal, suggested that a common game for TECO fans was to enter their name as a command sequence, and then try to work out what would happen. The same essay in describing TECO coined the acronym "YAFIYGI", meaning "You Asked For It You Got It" and thus being the antitheses of WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get").
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Need new sound to represent "icon".
Need new alphabet to represent that sound.
...twelve or so?
I can understand someone never having seen a floppy. And possibly a microphone (although there are digital ones in that shape). But a screwdriver and wrench? Seriously? A manilla folder? That just sounds insane to me.
Old woman!
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
In the beginning most original symbols were picto-grams or small drawings of what they represented. Probably even in the first generation of scribes pictograms were borrowed as phoneto-gram "sounds like" for more abstract words. Then combined to represent more nuanced ideas. Then sounds changed, but the ideograph remained the same. Then ideograms became styles, e.g. blocky for both cuneform and Chinese or simplified. Or origins just plain forgotten after centuries of use.
Chinese is a second language to me. When you learn the characters the only sure thing is to memorize thier shape, drawing sequence and pronunciation(s) [ yes a few have multiple pronunciations ]. But there are clues to the meaning and sound in a majority of the characters, probably due to their history.
Your language is full of anachronisms. What makes you think icons won't be too? We need a common symbology to communicate.
Nobody ever sees a "disk" (round rotating storage hardware), why do we still call them that? Especially since you're probably saving to a Flash drive, not a disk at all.
And what's a "dial" I'm supposed to use when I hear a "dial tone"? Though I guess I hear a dial tone only on antiquated desktop phones, that I see only in an office.
And what "wires" are they referring to when they say my network or phone are "wireless"?
--
make install -not war
Chinese characters, each of which represents a word or phrase, are evolved versions of icons that more or less literally represented their original meaning, from which the current meaning is derived. Very few Chinese people who use them every day have any idea what the original icon looked like. In many cases the original thing the icon represented either no longer exists, is far from common in use (especially in modern cities), or has evolved into a meaning at best barely recognizable.
Likewise most modern English words are derived from original words that would be totally unrecognized by modern speakers, especially the many foreign (French, Norse, Greek, Latin, etc) ones.
It's true that lots of icons aren't good ways to indicate their function based on recognizing the original object. But that's not how languages actually work.
--
make install -not war
When you talk about the $ sign, I remember when it was a U interwoven with a S (for "US"). Lazy 90 year olds.
UIs have indeed gone downhill a bit. The Public Storage website provides a typical example. They use orange or else light gray text on a white background, rendering contrast down to terrible levels. The default font size for data fields is tiny too. The readability is terrible and nobody there cares.
I attribute this to companies hiring the youngest and cheapest labor they can (and the least experienced), or offshoring dev.
In general UIs are in poor times. The Microsoft Ribbon's issues with consistency of access to functions is a large demonstration of this. (One of many examples: numbering functions in Word can be approached multiple ways in the UI, and some ways/paths omit critical settings the other paths have, leaving the user clueless how to do what he needs to do.) Marketers or hotshot visual designers run the show, and the result slaps the user in the face repeatedly.
As far as icons go, those trying to free them from their history are not considering the human perception issue. It's like some 17 year old who doesn't like red and green traffic lights and has the power to replace them with the words "CAN HAZ WALK?" and "RUN DOOD RUN".
Whereas it's easy to find a previous revision now, particularly if you didn't save the specific version that you're looking for under a separate filename? Come now. Search for changes by date and time. Search for changes that add or remove specific phrases. Display overall document length as a function of time. Zoomable, scrollable display of changes over time, with annotated marks at each 'save' point.
What percent of users are likely to learn to make the most of such a rich revision history viewer? What other applications index the revision history, and how much use does this feature see?
The twentieth century called; they want their storage technology back. Hard drives don't have to spin anymore.
Though they don't have to, they still do for cost reasons in most home computers that aren't A. premium-priced laptops or B. ARM-powered and touch-controlled. Until SSDs that meet the recommended system requirements for the latest version of Windows for x86-64 become dirt cheap, your average entry-level desktop or laptop PC will still have platters.
Use the 'save' button to insert an annotation in the editing history instead of creating or fixing a file.
And you still run into the problem of unwanted disclosure of editing history to the recipient of a document.
While were talking about accomodating the younger generations maybe we should also get rid of road signs as they seem too busy texting while driving to notice them as well. Is there an app for that?
/. topic icons often are nonsense as well but who cares? Why need to made an revolution for that? :P
At a company where no one seemed to have any graphic design skills and our toolbars were a random collection of misappropriated icons from various open source projects, I suggested we just use Chinese characters for everything. Our users are gonna have to attend training to figure out what the button's for anyway
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
doesn't make a whole lot of sense anymore and it's slowly being phased out. The idea that an OS was a virtual office was the reason for the office metaphor, desktop (of a typical office desk), file cabinet - Windows 3.1
That was a necessary lineage to get people to move away from the traditional file cabinets of steel. They couldn't just call it a workspace (desktop) or a database (file cabinet) because they are new terms and would require people that are set in their ways to change their ways.
Of course, given x amount of processing power, HD displays, multi-touch, motion sensors (Wii, Kinect etc.) we can potentially change the whole way we work. Why do we even have desks. We sit down in an ape-like position with hunched backs. I liked how in a clip of Prometheus (movie) it featured a gut standing up at the controls as he flew the ship. Who's to say we should even be in the medium of air to work - why not water sometimes for some scenarios?
The technology comes on the scene but the paradigm shift doesn't until some times later.
IMO, redundancy is the future. Multiple systems running in parallel doing thing simultaneously or using their redundant power to do it better than necessary. Everyone is useful and active to make things more stream-lined than they need to be and if, just IF something terrible goes wrong, all that redundancy just might save the day and allow things to keep ticking along.
In order for that to happen, we need to create a system based on using the most of what you have in the most efficient way. Nothing or noone is wasted. You have to be algorithmic in terms of getting the very most oof the maximum number of people efficiently. People were never told or warned that the world is overpopulated and should be allowed to play a roll in it's reduction without having to expunge themselves.
I don't defend the right to have as many children as you want. We don't live in that fantasy reality. We have to respect that there are people who are powerful who don't want that. But so too, should they respect the right of people to have a child and even a second one if something should happen to that chile or the parents win a lottery.
Only honest dialogue, and fair, automatic, algorithmic, non-human, untempered compromise can get us there at any decent rate.
This world is loaded up with crap and we are not being given the power to undo it. We are not presented with an ultimatum.There is no honest discourse. There is no 'reality' summit. It's all dishonesty and treachery and that gets nobody nowhere.
& we have the technology to fix it..
It's (should not be) just about what these - and other - icons look like, but more about what they represent and mean. It shouldn't matter that some of the objects/concepts depicted are not fashionable or used that much anymore, the only thing that should matter is that computer using people know what functionality they represent. And I've yet to meet people who don't know that.
It's pretty hard to find pictograms that are ageless. And since we still use a variety of devices and OSes (thank god, but who knows how long will it stay this way), and such fundamental changes would need to be accepted and used by all of them, otherwise you could indeed end up in a situation where people wouldn't know what functionality an icon represents on another OS. It would all become a mess.
I prefer to think of this - using historical pictorams in icons - as being reminded of computing history, and I don't really see any real reason in changing e.g. the save icon, or the copy/paste icons, etc. It would make absolutely no sense to change the floppy to an sdcard or something, because these technologies fade out faster than they appear. And you don't want to create an environment where icon pictograms need to be changed every 1-2 years to follow device and storage developments. I'm sorry but that would be simply insane.
Going for text menus only or going for the Ubuntu HUD is also a bit retarded, since while sometimes can be somewhat cool, most of the times is just a hindrance of real work and reduces your effectivity.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Its only symbolic representation of the thing its like a language people have developed from relevant objects and people have learnt and got used to. I wonder what he would comment about the hieroglyphics??
If only you'd started your post with "So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time."
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Wow, I only just noticed that the fonts only have 1 bar. I have always written it with 2.
I am not even from this continent, only been using $ for about 4 years now, I just never thought about it before.
How can it be that no one has ever noticed this before? Someday, maybe this guy will get lucky and invent sex.
How about we replace them with the correct terminology? Save, Save As, Search, or where the Hell did I put it? Speaking of search, how about bringing back the search on content?
In Korea, only old people use GUIs.
Youngsters let Siri take care of everything.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Darmok, where he saves his data
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
[A log of each stroke in a document] could be several kilobytes for a stroke with a wide brush.
You mean several millionths of the new convenient unit of measuring data storage on portable devices
Multiply by the average number of strokes in a document and by the number of documents of that type on a device, and then consider how much of your storage you want to devote to every document's revision history. Then consider doing the same with audio or video.
finding previous revisions is not as tedious as you suggest, since you can literally scroll back through them and observe the changes being made.
I can't try it myself because I don't know anyone who owns a Mac that runs Lion. So before I buy one to try it out, how long does it take for the computer to access each position on the scroll bar? Consider scrolling from day one to the middle of the history to the end and back. Is it smooth and fluid, or is there a delay of several seconds?
Oldest Icons are made in Ancient Asian writings. One day it will be no.1 again. I no lie. They ROR. :)
Yesterday's Weirdness is Tomorrow's Reason Why
If we're talking about icons, let's think a bit further and discuss other metaphors. Anyone really know what an arrow symbol comes from? Most people probably don't or they just forgot (this is a guess), but we all get the meaning of "it's pointing to something" behind it.
By the way, in case you were wondering, the arrow symbol was derived from, well, actual arrows from bows. An arrow always has a destination, just like the symbolic arrows.
I am not devoid of humor.
Actually, they turn out just like old expressions from the written/spoken language: they're there, we know what they mean, we just don't necessarily know why. I understand that someone might feel like it's quite the deal, but it's not something that hasn't ever happened before. We deal with it every day. Heck, entire language systems were "built" upon pictographic representations that aren't that obvious now. The only difference, I suppose, is the speed at which this is all happening; that we can actually see rather than imagine what it must have been like.
Windows 3 was hardly the first gui environment introduced to the masses. The Macintosh, for example, was released in 1984, some 6 years before Windows 3. (I do, however, agree that Windows 3 is the first GUI in *its* particular genetic line which is worth discussing. I've used a computer with Windows 1.0 and 2.0 on it. Ick.)
The only reason english is the default technical language is because of the dominance of the US economy on the world's playing field since the end of the second world war. Everything else mentioned above is plain bollocks. For one, English is not the only dynamic language in the world.
Forget it at your own peril.
This line escpecially resonated with me, "Actually, modern interfaces are confusing as hell because user interface design has become so screwed up"
Amen. The real problem here is a clown who doesn't know what an 'icon' really means. It's not just a pretty picture. That's why the Treasury doesn't change the $ you mentioned just because an unemployed graphic artist needs a job designing a "more modern" symbol to confuse 100,000,000 users still earning dollars. Sony tried getting creative with icons, and look what happened to them.
people are wired since birth to quickly recognize faces. a good experiment would be to devise a test if people recognize faces for icons quicker than conventional icons after learning them with the text above the icon and then timing it with just mouse-over after learning the icons.
Interesting. Right. When I was younger - yeah, we chipped them out of stone - the dollar sign DID have two vertical slashes and we were trained to write it that way. Today, the double slash is so rare it might look odd. Mind you, far as I know, it took half a century to make that transition.
People know what they represent, there's no need to alter them to something that they aren't going to know. (Although microsorft do this anyway - hey! its a new version! Lets change everything, and move it)
!?
Someday soon it'll be your resume that goes stright into the bit bucket.
Aragorn to Frodo: Notice the strange glyphs beside the door? This door is magically sealed.
Gandalf: Step aside. I shall try to open it.
(an hour later)
Frodo to Aragon: What's taking so long?
Aragon to Frodo: Gandalf must touch the glyphs in the right order to open the door.
Gandalf to Pippin: Peregrin Took! Put down my staff! A wizard's staff is no toy to be fooled with!
If you accidentally touched the right sequenced of glyphs (flat buttons on the side of the staff) you might have hit someone with a lightning bolt! (laser fire)
Also, if you had somehow fumbled and managed to break the staff it would have caused a devastating explosion (power cell inside staff loses containment and explodes)