Modernizing the Save Icon? 365
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?"
CYA (Score:3, Funny)
Re:CYA (Score:4, Funny)
Yes and the letters underneath it will stand for Save To Disk, so you'll have a butt with an STD...
Re:CYA (Score:3, Funny)
Jesus saves.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Jesus saves.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Jesus saves.. (Score:5, Funny)
The day of the contest came, and both Jesus and the Devil worked all day long, making spreadsheets, typing documents and scanning images.
Just a few minutes before the contest ended, the power went out. The devil started cursing and screaming, but Jesus simply turned his PC back on, and printed his work for God to judge.
The devil started screaming that Jesus had cheated, and it wasn't fair, but all God said was...
Jesus saves!
Re:Jesus saves.. (Score:2)
Re:Jesus saves.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Jesus saves.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Jesus saves.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Jesus saves.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Jesus saves.. (Score:4, Funny)
but . . .
Pharoh's daughter pulled a prophet from the Nile
and Noah floated his stock while the rest of the world liquidated!
How about glad wrap? (Score:2, Funny)
Probably stay the same... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why does it have to change? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Yes, floppy disks are floppy... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why does it have to change? (Score:5, Insightful)
In a time where people are either toatlly into working with computers and those who are just getting the hang of things, I think this totally makes sense. When was the last time stop signs changes or that red changed to green with traffic lights? Meaning and symbols in most respects have never had intrinsic mieaning so why change them now? Put a CD instead of a floppy and you'll have people thinking that they'll start up a CD burning app, put a USB symbol there and most people will be simply confused. Although symbolically inaccurate -- I for one never use floppies except when rescuing old computers -- I think that it is important to uphold this feature in particular as it is widely used across all platforms and in virtually all applications. Might even give those who couldn't care less a little insight into how symbols really don't have anything to do with thier meaning, or in this case, thier function.
actually the signs DO change (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why does it have to change? (Score:2)
Re:Why does it have to change? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah, but Microsoft has updated [viaarena.com] the Windows control panel icon for Displays. And they've done so at a point in time (2001) when CRT's are still hugely common (and useful). Compare the CRT to a floppy, and the floppy is far more obsolete.
I just asked my non-geek roommate, "What's the last time you used a floppy disk?" And he thought for a minute and said, "I can't remember!" That's
Re:Why does it have to change? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah, but can you give me one example of another computer storage media that is as widely s
Re:Why does it have to change? (Score:4, Informative)
> Yet no one seems to really be able to offer something as good in return...
It's called the Internet. I don't even hang out with anyone on dial-up, let alone completely non-Internet-enabled so even the roundabout method of e-mailing a file attachment works like a charm, especially on tiny, sub-1.4MB files like those that fit on a floppy. Ten seconds.
And if you say "what if that computer's net connection is disabled and it needs to be booted/repaired/given a file and a floppy drive is all it has..." remember my original point, that a floppy (and perhaps a USB floppy drive if your other computers are all modern) belongs in your repair kit, not in every computer made. EDO RAM falls in this same category.
>
I haven't noticed this problem...my replacement was the USB sticks, and I also haven't really found a non-compatible computer recently. If you're going to be dealing with computer so obsolete that it has no USB ports, well then, either it's yours (upgrade!) or it's a special occasion (in which case burning a CD would be cheaper (50 were US$8 the last spindle I bought), faster on both ends (floppies are dog slow, although I spotted a "2x" USB floppy drive the other day at work), and worth the five seconds to fire up Nero.
Oh, but don't ever plug a non-write-protected USB key into an XBOX (while running its non-hacked OS). It will say "There was a problem with a memory card. It has been erased." Ouch.
An even bigger example of an outmoded metaphor (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
Re:An even bigger example of an outmoded metaphor (Score:3, Insightful)
Expressions like that stick around but may not mean much to those with no real frame of reference.
Re:An even bigger example of an outmoded metaphor (Score:4, Interesting)
The Mac had 'em round before Windows. Some much older cars actually had round radio buttons; at the time this would have been archaic but recognizable. Round was chosen because gives a visual cue that the buttons are different than checkboxes; this kind of subtle thing was a big part of the Mac design philosophy. Motif demonstrates that this visual cue is not critical,but it is useful.
Visual design tends to swing between squareish and roundish. Round was in in the 40s and 50s. Cars (and even appliances) had rounded curves (the tailfins being the exception). Design in the 60's and 70's emphasized sharp straight edges, epitomized by the large, boxy cars, often with gratuitous creases in body panels. Check out the car in Starsky and Hutch [starskyandhutch.biz] -- even the paint job creates angles and points. I assure you this was a very cool automobile back in the 70s. The buttons on the radio followed along and also became boxy. In the 80s, the Ford Taurus ushered in the melted look. The retro PT cruiser and VW Bug pretty much hark back to the rounded days of the 50s. You'll also note that buttons on car radios these days tend to be oval.
Computer design lags design in general, probably because geeks are not very up to date on such things. However, if you see somebody trying to give an app an innovative look, you'll see extremely rounded buttons (Aqua) or in some cases round edged windows (certain media player skins). The original iMac was and example in hardware which pretty much borrowed the old rounded look. In computer terms it was the equivalent of the PT Cruiser, harking back to the old Lear Siegler ADM-3 (try googling for an image), except lacking its crisp creases. 70's design married curves and creases.
I expect crisp edges will make a comeback in design some time in the next decade. It'll either come back as boxiness, or a 70's retro curves and creases look. Expect to see media player skins with severely rectangular buttons etc.
It's been a long time... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure they are important to some people, but I'm not going to see it.
FYI: 'ZZ' is the same as ':wq' (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's been a long time... (Score:4, Interesting)
Waaaaay offtopic (show some love, Mods), but have you checked out the "Personal Toolbar" on Mozilla since v1.4? Go into the about:config and set "browser.chrome.favicons" to "true", and "browser.chrome.load_toolbar_icons" to "2" (I have no idea why Mozilla has these off by default, with not even a regular preferences option to turn them on). Now, all of the bookmarks in your "Personal Toolbar" folder will use icons (each will update after the next time you click it), allowing you erase their text description completely and still use them. So, instead of fitting a dozen or so personal favorites as a mere line of densely packed text, you can fit almost 50 of them on a typical screen.
For an extra 20 pixels of horizontal space, I no longer need to use any of the bookmark folders, and only rarely need to type in a URL. And if the icons hit the end of the personal toolbar, just do a "sort folder" by "last visited", and get rid of the ones you never use.
Truly wonderful. I too used to consider all the stupid little toolbar icons as less than useful (they take up screen space, after all!), but since discovering you can basically have an iconic representation of your most commonly used bookmarks, I've "learned to love the bomb", so to speak.
My only wish regarding the personal toolbar... I figured out how to make it 32 pixels high (just stick "toolbarbutton.bookmark-item >
why change? (Score:5, Interesting)
They never learn (Score:2, Funny)
What makes it much, much worse is that they NEVER LEARN. Ever! I've tried explaining it to some of them several times to no avail.
(-1 Redundant)
Re:They never learn (Score:2, Funny)
Re:They never learn (Score:2)
Re:They never learn (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:why change? (Score:5, Funny)
hrmm (Score:5, Funny)
looks nothing like a floppy...what are you people smoking?
Re:hrmm (Score:3, Funny)
i wouldn't be suprised is RMS saw that as ASCII art for a floppy...
Example icons for ^x^s and :w (Score:3, Funny)
Do you find it sicker that I've made a mock-up of a toolbar icon for ^x^s [jk0.org] (Emacs save command) or that I've made one for :w [jk0.org] (vi save command) as well?
Re:hrmm (Score:2)
Surely?
Re:hrmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, neither is as intuitive for typical users as selecting "Save" from a menu or clicking a "Save" button on a toolbar. Sine EMACS and vi are typically used by enthusiasts/professionals, the issue of intuitiveness is essentially moot.
Re:hrmm (Score:2, Funny)
C-x is the prefix for an extended command. It also chords nicely if your control key is in the proper location.
Perhaps the author of the write-up is correct, however, and we should similarly modernize emacs. I propose that henceforth, C-x shall be known as the prefix for extreme commands, such as extreme saving or extreme printing
Re:hrmm (Score:3, Insightful)
No keystrokes are really intuitive, they all have to be learnt. Some English speakers may claim C-s means save, but why not C-w for write,C-b for backup or C-d for disk etc?
so what does the : mean? Not all commands have to have a colon, do they? :wq not really the save command?
Why do you have to w(rite) rather than s(ave), and why do you have to q(uit), or is
Standard keystrokes or standard icons, or both, are best as that
Re:hrmm (Score:3, Informative)
I assume you're asking from a UI perspective, rather than asking what the actual reason is, and on that level, I agree - it doesn't make sense if you approach vi as a newbie. The Vi Way(tm) is a very learned skill.
As far as the actual question of _why_ there are colon commands, it has to do with the fact that originally, vi was built on top of ed (and was written by Bill Joy). ed was a line oriented, rather than screen oriented, ed
Re:hrmm (Score:2)
You did make changes to that document, didn't you?
Re:hrmm (Score:3, Informative)
Serious answer (Score:5, Informative)
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".
Re:Serious answer (Score:2)
Except that they look the same unless you squint, and everything else uses the floppy disk. In this case and in many others, standard is better than better.
Re:Serious answer (Score:2)
Re:Serious answer (Score:4, Informative)
The telephone icon (Score:5, Insightful)
Save goes away, just like the floppy (Score:3, Insightful)
you don't "save" using any of these, right?
Instead you commit, or upload, or send.
Maybe you'll click "Check" when you're ready,
and the file will do what it needs to do--
commit itself, upload itself, send, save, etc.
Cheers, Joel
Save replacement (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Save replacement (Score:2)
Don't shoot me for mentioning an MS product, but if you used Office and saved everything in
Re:Save replacement (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope that instead of a save button, some programs will constantly save work and provide a timeline-like feature to go through all changes in the document if neccessary.
I use vim [vim.org] and RCS [gnu.org] for this purpose.
RCS allows me to check in and out revisions, and each revision has a change log. I can roll back changes, check differences, and even make my own branch of a file.
Subversion [tigris.org], CVS [cvshome.org], Arch [gnuarch.org] and many others also can fill the same role. Heck, you can even make a directory named backup and rename a copy of the file to 'myfile_date'. The reason why I settled on RCS is that its relatively simple to use and its cross platform (Linux, BSD, Windows-via-Cygwin, etc). I've been tempted to adopt one of the larger revision control systems for additional features, but haven't gotten around to it.
As for Vim, its cross platform, rather full featured, and if the power goes out, I still can recover the file. Plus its easy to use with RCS through a few simple aliases and/or keymaps. There is also Gnu Emacs [gnu.org] or XEmacs [xemacs.org] and a host of other good text editors.
Sure, there could be one program that would do both, but that wouldn't be as useful. The unix philosophy of "do one thing, and do it well" is less of a pain in the long run. This way, I can reuse my $editor_of_choice in many other unix applications - slrn, mutt, etc. If I had one integrated program, sooner or later I'd become fed up with one part of it or another, and I would be forced to continue using it.
Just my $.02.
YMMV.
Who cares if it's meaninless (Score:2)
Computers are full of anacronisms... My favorite is the strerror() output for ENOTTY (on some systems, probably pre-posix): "Not a typewriter". Well, duh...
No change; interface metaphors aren't literal. (Score:2)
Saving is really just committing to all of your changes since the last checkpoint/save point. If the idea of "Save" changes at all it
Re:No change; interface metaphors aren't literal. (Score:2, Funny)
Exactly right. The icon should represent the idea behind saving rather than the actual physical media itself. And one thing that will not change in the near future is the serialization of our virtual world into a stream of bits to be laid down one by one
They floppy disk is not dead.... (Score:3, Informative)
I went for three years without using a Floppy and finally just broke down and bought a USB floppy drive. There is just no easier way to flash a bios and make a backup.
Floppy disks are well suited to their current day task of saving small files and flashing the bios.
This coming from a person who uses a Thumbdrive, DVD-RW, or a Archos 20GB hdd to transport files.
Re:They floppy disk is not dead.... (Score:2)
Re:They floppy disk is not dead.... (Score:2)
I only ever use floppies if/when Im installing a new OS. Depending on the phase of the moon, one of those floppy drives works. Exactly which one is random. After trying to make a boot disk on one of a stack of 30 floppy disks, I usually (but not always) get one that works.
A couple of weeks ago, I happened to have a new server in here that I installed FC-1 on. It had a PXEable NIC on the b
Re:They floppy disk is not dead.... (Score:2)
Re:They floppy disk is not dead.... (Score:2)
Sure there is. Easier than keeping ancient floppy drives around, anyway. Turn the floppy image into a bootable ISO.
First, set up the image (where boot.img is a pre-existing bootable floppy image):
mount boot.img -r -o loop
Then...
mkdir boot.iso.d
mv boot.img boot.iso.d
mkisofs -R -J -o boot.iso -b boot.img boot.iso.d
And burn the iso. I'm sure k3b would be easier than the command line but I can't get it to work under 2.6.3. The cdrecord command
"Buddy Jesus" Icon (Score:2, Funny)
He gives you the thumbs up for saving!
Re:"Buddy Jesus" Icon (Score:2)
That was probably one of the funniest moments in the movie.
Jesus (Score:2)
Which picture of Jesus? The one where he is hanging on a cross, or the one where he is a shepherd with sheep around him[1].
Not that it matters, we don't know what Jesus looks like, there are no historical accounts. We can guess a little: he was Jewish which specifies some general things.
[1]Interestingly enough, there is no account of Jesus having anything to do with sheep. He was the carpenter's son (it was supposed by those who didn't accept the divine birth story), and recognized as such when he went
Re:Jesus (Score:3, Funny)
'jfb
Re:Jesus (Score:3, Informative)
Such ignorance begs to be corrected.
Read John 10:11 [gospelcom.net] in which Jesus says: "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep." He says again in verse 14: "I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me." That is merely a small portion of that passage. The passage is entitled "The Shepherd and His Flock." Almost the whole chapter of John 10 deals with Jesus and sheep.
Why have a save icon? (Score:2)
Re:Why have a save icon? (Score:2)
MS Word for Mac has a Save icon on its toolbar.
...It's a Zip-100 disk [starseven.net].
Re:Why have a save icon? (Score:2)
Percieved Meaning (Score:2)
Plus images of floppies still tend to persist in movies and the like. Somehow they are real "hardcore computer hacker" tools or something.
--Stephen
Some icons never die (Score:2)
At least the floppy icon is fairly standard so unlike icons such as the magnifying glass (is it "search" or is it "zoom") it doesn't leave me guessing.
MacOS (Score:2)
I know how people hate hearing that "Apple has already done it" but it must be said. In MacOS they've replaced the picture of a floppy used for their save icon with a holographic crystal. You've all heard that all Apple hardware comes with holographic drives now right?
Michael. [michael-forman.com]
I've got a better question.... (Score:2)
You, me, and the Hurd, baby. (Score:2)
How about... (Score:2)
While we're at it... (Score:2)
When was the last time you saw a 5 1/2" foppy disk anyway? Relax - it's a rhetorical question. I know you're looking at one right now.
Re:While we're at it... (Score:4, Funny)
I can honestly say I've never seen such a thing.
forget what the new icon should look like... (Score:2)
Save? What about Trash... (Score:2, Funny)
Ok, you can have Save be the portrait of Jesus if you have the Trash Can become a portrait of Bush.
What next? (Score:5, Funny)
Who the hell cares what the picture looks like? (Score:5, Insightful)
My Vote Goes to: (Score:2)
And with storage as big as it is now, who deletes anything nowadays.
Who needs an icon? (Score:2)
Why do you need a third way of saving? Do you feel the same need for a 'quit' icon?
I've only seen a few apps with save icons on the mac, generally from Microsoft, who either didn't understand the idea of Apple's user interface quitelines or decided to undermine them in a fit of envy. Luckily you can throw away the pointless save icon using tools>customise
Counter-intuitive saving (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole concept of saving files (including the word itself) is counter-intuitive to most people. If you know that the computer makes a temporary copy of the file and then wants to copy the new file over the old one, then the word makes sense. You've made changes to a different file. But the average user doesn't realize this, nor should they. They think that what they see on the screen is the file. When I edit a file, any fool looking at the screen can see that the changes have been made. Why would the computer ask you to do something you have already done? Intuitively, the screen represents the current state of the file, so if I wish to stop working on a document, it implies that I'm satisfied with its contents. If I create a new file, add some data and then try to close the document, at that point the software should intervene and ask me to pick a name for the file.
I could see a person accustomed to using the word 'save' in the phrase "I'm not sure I really need this any more, should I throw it away? No, I'll save it, just in case..." to interpret the save prompt in the same way, i.e. I've decided to discard the changes I'm making, but maybe I'll save them in case I want to make a permanent change later, more like a recycle bin.
My suggestion is get rid of 'save' altogether, and replace it with something like 'Confirm your changes', and a big green check mark in place of the floppy disk. Why bother the user with an icon representing the mechanics of the operation?
Re:Counter-intuitive saving (Score:3, Insightful)
Or even better, make this an OS feature and have the filesystem handle it. Didn't one of the OS (VMS?) have some "versioned files" feature like that?
Re:Counter-intuitive saving (Score:3, Interesting)
Users may not be aware of the security implications of what the software is doing. There could be some incriminating information that they deleted in the current document, but remains in the older versions. Remember the Office metadata and hidden "deleted" data fiascos reported here on /.?
My vote goes for a Camera with a flash going off. (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Re:My vote goes for a Camera with a flash going of (Score:3, Interesting)
People tend to intepret icons literally. If I saw an icon of a camera, I would guess that it was for importing images from a digital camera.
Keep it! (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
Re:Keep it! (Score:3, Interesting)
I have to defend the old scissors icon for "cut". It's always made perfect sense to me. But, then again, I grew up actually doing "real" cut-&-pasting with some scissors, glue and a photocopier.
Re:Keep it (Power Icon) (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, if the rocker switch has 2 positions, and a symbol for each, when both functions are set to the same button, you simply assign both symbols tho the same button by superimposing one onto the other. That's how it makes sense.
Oh, and with the scissors, they make sense for 'cut' because that's what scisors do. They cut. (paper, your finger, the cat's tail if they're sharp enough, etc.)
I know (Score:3, Funny)
(emacs zealots refrain from modding, plz)
We need "What Things Are" (Score:3, Funny)
There used to be a Mac program which found every unique icon on the machine and displayed them all on one screen. Terrifying.
Re:Floppies (Score:4, Insightful)
Floppies are dead at the enthusiast level (hell keychain dongles are cool - but of course I don't have one of those), I think they are dropping out of the home market, and have no idea what is going on in the corprate market in general (I guess I have a couple floppy drives on machines buried somewhere in my office)
Re:Floppies (Score:4, Interesting)
As for floppies
Re:Floppies (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked in a college computer lab. Every day I tried to recover one or two busted floppies. It was the only thing the Macs were good for. Their "SuperDrives" were better for recovering PC floppies than real PCs.
Floppies are less economical and less durable than CD-Rs in every way. Putting a floppy in your backpack is begging for trouble. The "correct" solution would be network drives, but even English majors figured out the next best thing: Email the file to yourself.
Re:Floppies (Score:2)
Re:Floppies (Score:2)
It's true that some older systems don't support USB booting, but you don't state that as an issue. I have 2 of them (128MB for personal and 256MB for work) and have converted more than one person from floppies to these little wonders. If $40 is too much, you can even find 32MB versions for ~$15...
They are also much faster than floppies and
Re:Floppies (Score:2, Funny)
couldn't figure out why my printer was jammed, looked inside, and i see a little green army man trying to help me out.
thanks son..:-)
Re:Floppies (Score:2, Informative)
A blank CD-RW costs $0.90 (AUD) or so, a blank floppy costs about $1.10. The CD not only holds better than 400 Floppies worth of data, it is cheaper to boot. So, explain to me how the floppy is economical.. particularly since the floppy *might* survive a couple of hundred rewrites and the CD-RW is good for 10k or so.
err!
jak