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Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore

hanselman.com

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Re: Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore

#221

Post by falcojr »

drostie wrote: post #202
shanselman wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, I suspect there is nothing we can replace it with. A TV with rabbit ears will always be a TV - perhaps a hundred years from now?

This "nothing we can replace it with" sounded wrong to me, so I spent a moment trying to quickly draw on my tablet some possible alternate metaphors for many of the things used in this article, and I came up with these: http://drostie.org/icons.png (Disclaimer: my ability to draw is very limited so this looks unintentionally minimalist, because my "boxes" are just squares.) You could have some convention which says,…

I like the look of those, but I did laugh when I saw the cell phone with an antenna on the top.

Re: Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore

#222

Post by Produce »

dasil003 wrote: post #196
Produce wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still call them directories. "Folders" are for toddlers who do not know the tao of unix. So are icons. Real men stare at text all day, eat with their hands and sleep when they're dead. The funny/sad part is that I'm half serious with these statements.

As long as you don't use a sissy language like Pascal I'd say you've earned it.

I use PHP. /cowers in shame

Re: Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore

#223

Post by benholmen »

jack-r-abbit wrote: post #50
gdubs wrote: post #41

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 However, if the suggestion is that we force ourselves to constantly update iconography because the metaphors are outdated, I don't agree.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…

For us young ones: How do sea navigators measure their ships speed? http://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae400.cfm

Another interesting word is 'log' which we use daily in a digital sense but it has a very physical nautical origin:

log: "from log (n.1) which is so called because a wooden float at the end of a line was cast out to measure a ship's speed. General sense by 1913."

Source: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=log&allowed_in_...

Re: Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore

#224

Post by Angostura »

hej wrote: post #78
mindstab wrote: post #21

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.

I think those symbols are just learned. Take folders. They look like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/50/Earthwise.jpg That makes it obvious where the symbol is coming from. The only problem is that those kinds of folders are not commonly used in Germany. I think I never saw a folder like that before I started using computers. Folders look like this in Germany: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co…

It took me many years to work out that that the Mail icon I saw everywhere with the little red flag was a U.S mailbox. Where I live mail comes through a slot in the door.

Re: Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore

#225

Post by roc »

maaku wrote: post #134
roc wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that particular one we don't have to worry about. The expectation of having to explicitly 'save' an electronic file is (finally) on its way out.

Really? Than what do you call the action of making particular snapshots of file state?

Copies.

Save is going away. Save As is going the way of "duplicate"/"fork".

Re: Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore

#226

Post by Angostura »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #220

I thought that the article did a good job of explaining the problem of changes in the world making things change appearance or shape, but not some other causes of icons not making sense. To me, icons indicating actions (save, print, etc) work well when they depict (wholly or partly) a physical object that is obviously used to enact that action. I assume that this is because our visual cortex is tuned to recognise phy…

Since we are still going with file and folder, why not make the metaphor complete and go with a filing cabinet with an arrow either directed towards or away from an open drawer.

Re: Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore

#227

Post by alttag »

roc wrote: post #225
maaku wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Than what do you call the action of making particular snapshots of file state?

Copies. Save is going away. Save As is going the way of "duplicate"/"fork".

... only in Lion.

I've been using that workflow for nearly a year now, and it's still driving me batty. It's inconvenient and backward, and I hope it gets reverted.

Re: Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore

#228

Post by goblin89 »

__alexs wrote: post #183
jreeve wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me very much of how the genesis of ideographic writing (such as Chinese characters) was related to me. I'm not at all certain that it is correct, but gist of it was that these forms of writing start with illustrations but gradually become encoded over time.

I quite like the idea of doing an app where all the icons are Chinese ideographs with native language tooltips and descriptions. It would be a little like living in the Firefly universe but with more iPhones.

It won't make much sense to do in one app. Users (except for Firefly fans and/or Chinese learners) will hate it, because the complex design of hanzi is optimized for having thousands of these characters to distinguish between.

Now, if we had all the icons in all apps replaced consistently with Chinese simplified characters—that would be fun. I don't think it would be such a disaster (except to icon design business profits), after we rediscover how functions map to pictures again we'll continue to utilize UIs as usual. Admittedly a bit slower because of more complex hanzi shape, but without having to deal with badly designed or inconsistently used icons[0].

And also we'll be sure that when a new concept appears we will have an icon for that. If not—well, we'll start combining hanzi.

[0] An example of one such goof: http://plus.google.com/photos/108564542236590882918/albums/p...

Re: Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore

#229

Post by jack-r-abbit »

duaneb wrote: post #64
jack-r-abbit wrote: post #35

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…

> 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. 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, an…

no point. just offering a suggestion.

Re: Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore

#230

Post by brlewis »

epo wrote: post #208
philipdlang wrote: post #104

Really interesting, but a correction should be noted: CC is for courtesy copy, not carbon copy

Citation required, my understanding is that CC predates emails and would designate those to whom carbon copies were to be sent.

It definitely predates emails. I'm 44 and I've always heard "carbon copy", never "courtesy copy".

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=cc http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/carbon-copy.html

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