Redesigning the Save Symbol • Hacker News Board

Re: Redesigning the Save Symbol

#41

Post by krapp » Fri, Apr 05, 2013, 11:56 PM UTC

fyi80 wrote: post #19

nglevin wrote: post #11

I always wondered why nobody else seemed to follow the lead of Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows. Use "save" and "load" icons that portray arrows pointing to and from folders [1]. Never have to worry about a floppy again. Turns out, these guys just did that. Except with documents [2] and clouds [3] instead of folders. Guess iOS did away with those. [1] - As seen in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lotus_1-2-3_9.8_Windows.p..…

but wtf is a "folder", now?

a folder's a folder. Go into an office depot and you can buy boxes of them. people still use them all the time.

Re: Redesigning the Save Symbol

#42

Post by thatthatis » Fri, Apr 05, 2013, 11:56 PM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #12

A "phone" these days is usually, more or less, a small box with one glowy side. Yet these self-same devices, to represent "phone", use the silhouette of the handset from an old Bell Telephone landline model, thirty years after those phones went out of fashion. To even the younger generation, that shape means "phone", even if it doesn't look like a phone. Similarly, the D-pad from a NES controller -- or worse, an Atar…

Last week on the front page of reddit: "I was cleaning up my office today and I found a bunch of 'Save' buttons" -- http://i.imgur.com/0R9EUmx.jpg

http://sl.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1b22bl/i_was_cleaning_...

Re: Redesigning the Save Symbol

#43

Post by marssaxman » Fri, Apr 05, 2013, 11:57 PM UTC

joeld42 wrote: post #33

What's so bad about a floppy disk icon? Even if the kids today don't know what that is, they still know the icon means save. We recognize a pawnbroker's symbol or a barber pole without knowing where they came from.

Funny, I have never before seen or heard of the "pawnbroker's symbol". I looked it up and I guess you mean the three circles hanging from a line. Is it a regional thing, I wonder? Here in the western USA, the only sign I would associate with a pawnbroker is "dingy neon". I wonder if the traditional sign is still used in areas which had pawnbrokers before the invention of lighted signage.

Re: Redesigning the Save Symbol

#44

Post by endlessvoid94 » Fri, Apr 05, 2013, 11:59 PM UTC

I think the idea of "save" may even go away. For example, there's no save button on google docs.

Computers should never lose your work, you shouldn't have to instruct it.

Re: Redesigning the Save Symbol

#45

Post by krapp » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 12:03 AM UTC

Detrus wrote: post #5

The save symbol doesn't need to become universally known like radiation and biohazard. The concept won't need to be known in another decade.

I hope (and believe) you're wrong... I want to have the option to chose when and where to save my work. Not having this choice seems to imply a future in which no one has any real control over a filesystem or their files.

... which I suppose one can see coming from a mile away, but I really hope it doesn't become ubiquitous.

Re: Redesigning the Save Symbol

#46

Post by Aloha » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 12:06 AM UTC

This seems to me to be like proposing a square wheel because round ones are unattractive.

If you have a universal cultural idiom, I think it means you won the war of conveying a concept.

Re: Redesigning the Save Symbol

#47

Post by xsmasher » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 12:08 AM UTC

ChikkaChiChi wrote: post #27

Maybe I'm getting old, but seeing conversations like this irritate me. All I see in that wall of text are activity indicators, upload icons, and "TO THE CLOUD!!!" icons. Internet Comment Designers seem to think that skeuomorphism (a word they love using to tell the world 'LOOK, I KNOW BIG WORDS SO I MUST BE GOOD AT THINGS') must always be a bad thing...as if using the icon to save as a floppy disk is somehow less con…

FYI this is not skeuomorphism, it's more like anachronism. Different 50-cent word.

Re: Redesigning the Save Symbol

#48

Post by Aloha » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 12:08 AM UTC

grinich wrote: post #15

App should just save automatically. Usually when people use save, they actually want to take an action. (ie: exporting the file somewhere, sending it to someone, etc.) This thread should focus on identifying those actions and finding more universal ways to make them ubiquitous. What if there was a universal "send this" or "invite someone to collaborate" button?

That's a great idea if we all had a versioning file system (or for that matter if the filesystem could be a bit more abstract from the actual bits on the disk), most of us do not. Because there are many cases I can think of where you don't wanna save.

Re: Redesigning the Save Symbol

#49

Post by lifeisstillgood » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 12:10 AM UTC

I disagree that no-one is ever likely to replace a floppy icon - the argument is based on the idea that everyone today knows what the floppy icon means.

everyone is only 1 billion people with a USA influenced cultural history and a Microsoft influenced PC history.

FirefoxOS stands a good chance of reaching a new billion people, and some mobile device will, and what will the chinese-ubuntu choose for save? There are going to be 10bn people alive in 2050 (I hope!) and 9bn of them have not seen a floppy disk icon.

It might be that we stick with the icon and everyone starts spelling skeuomorphism wrong. But is it likely?

So I quite like the discussion shown here. There are a couple of good ideas. And the new devices, then new mental models of synching local and remote storage, are going to need new iconography. Will these guys do it? Only if they buy a domain, produce high quality glyphs with open discussions, make it free and blog about it incessantly - then maybe when the next big thing comes along, they might just reach out and take the easy icon set. That would be nice.

Re: Redesigning the Save Symbol

#50

Post by morsch » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 12:10 AM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #17

grinich wrote: post #15

App should just save automatically. Usually when people use save, they actually want to take an action. (ie: exporting the file somewhere, sending it to someone, etc.) This thread should focus on identifying those actions and finding more universal ways to make them ubiquitous. What if there was a universal "send this" or "invite someone to collaborate" button?

Then you would have to have millions of buttons for the millions of things people do with files. The beauty of the filesystem is that a single function (save) can be extended by other programs into many things. (Source control, file transfer, editing in another program, ect.)

The fact that you don't manually save does not mean the files aren't represented on a file system. Source control, file transfer and editing in another program can work unchanged.

Though you would need to worry about atomicity when having a file open in two editors constantly "auto-saving" the document; you'd need some way to synchronise state. Probably easiest to make file write access exlusive by default.