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Fun read. However, if the suggestion is that we force ourselves to constantly update iconography because the metaphors are outdated, I don't agree. Sailors still say "knots", but I bet young ones don't all know why. People say "breadboard" all of the time when building electronics. Similarly, the very letters of our language evolved out of symbols that meant something to some humans long ago, just as words have an et…
A tin (can) is still a tin despite the fact it has nothing to do with the element today, a light bulb has no bulb any more. The floppy=save isn't going anywhere.
Around halfway through I jotted down a few thoughts. I like and appreciate people thinking about this sort of thing however, so I'm not saying any of this to offend. > I don't see any reason that we couldn't be storing our files in abstract squares rather than folders in the sky. ...because they're called folders, and we know how to use them? If I said, "Here, have a square," is your first instinct really to think oh…
To give an example, the word "microphone" has only been used to represent modern microphones since 1929. The term referred to the mouthpiece for a telephone between 1929 and ~1878, and from ~1878 until 1683, it described ear trumpets.[1]
[1] http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&s...
I use an SD card (one way or another) almost daily. It would only take a small amount of reworking to make the "floppy disk" Save icon look like an SD card and still look enough like the original icon to not confuse people. The cloud is cool and all but many devices (even cloud enabled ones) make use of some sort of physical storage. Many devices do not have the capability (or even the need) to get data straight from…
What would be the point, though? Surely the floppy disk icon has more meaning now as "save" than as the original metaphor of "save to floppy disk." Besides, SD cards are outdated now - I think the only thing of mine which uses it is my camera, and I never actually remove the card. I would guess that more people would recognize the floppy disk than the sd card.
Being anachronistic isn't inherently a flaw. However, if our attachment to anachronism is preventing us from using more intuitive icons, then our bias toward anachronism is something we should examine critically.
So, the real question is: are there more intuitive visual representations available for common computer actions? What does an e-mail address book look like?
The idea that people don't know what a cog or a wrench is seems like the author is taking this a step too far. I wouldn't call those things "shrouded in mystery". Similarly there are still plenty of microphones that look like that, they're professional microphones, not "old fashioned" ones.
Plus, once a reference is established (like the floppy disk) it's idiotic to always replace it with the latest tech (we'd have zip drives in the nineties, usb drives in the '00s, the cloud today, etc etc..)
It doesn't really matter as long as it's roughly ubiquitous, which the floppy drive is. It doesn't even matter if no one's seen a floppy drive; if someone doesn't recognize what the floppy icon does, then the rest of their computer is new to them and they're learning. Once learned, forget about it.
Etc.
Is this from the future? We still save to disks... sure the media has changed, but we're doing the same task. After reviewing the author, filed under: Comedy!
Also, if you want to talk about outdated terminology, theres "disk" and "drive". These are being incorrectly applied to flash/solid state storage. They do apply to hard disk drives, and optical media.
I'd love to go to schools and get kids in groups like Or maybe they've learned all these icons and while not getting what they did mean, they understand what they mean now, like letters of a new alphabet. Like how many Asian script characters are descendants of more obvious pictograms of actions. They still have meaning even if they've evolved a bit and even changed.
From the stackoverflow thread linked by rapidnsnail: > I tried this on my 9 and 13 year old nephews. I asked what does this button mean? "Save" they both answered immediately. Then I asked what the image looks like? They had no idea - not even a suggestion (which is fair since they haven't ever seen a disk). So I guess the meaning has overriden the image itself in the icon so we're stuck with it. http://stackoverflow…
So that's where radio buttons comes from! And yes my TV has rabbit ears, only they are the wifi antennas on my router :)