Don't people still use manilla folders and hanging folders to keep records of various medical/insurance/tax/legal papers at home? (these industries haven't exactly digitized their workflow) (I certainly do)
I do. My sister, however (not in tech), has a cardboard box with papers in it - and she is considered The Organized One by all her friends.
This sounds familiar. Most of my friends (both in an out of tech) have similar. We also often have a second box full of folders that we're One Day™ going to use to organise our important pieces of paper into.
What's next, redesigning half of the English language because it contains so many words derived from Latin?
It doesn't matter where icons, words, or any identifier comes from so long as everyone understands it. If you're creating a new icon then it's a good idea to make the design intuitive as this improves its chance for adaption, but doing so to an ubiquitous icon such as "save" is just counter-productive.
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…
Icons representing 'obsolete' technology work as ideograms because the form factor of that old technology was unique enough to express a concept in a few pixels, whereas everything now is just some form of a nondescript box which chances are does multiple things. I ran into this problem a couple of years ago when I had to design a television graphic for my company... you know how difficult it is to convey "television…
This is a good point - we've moved to a place where function no longer needs to dictate form to the same extent that it once did. A cassette tape was shaped the way it was in order to fulfill specific mechanical requirements.
Yet there is value in being able to decide when a versioning point should be created. This is actually a huge annoyance for me when I'm using Apple's apps that are "always and continually auto-saved". Yes, automatic integrity is nice (when it works), but not being able to make certain decisions about a file's state is pretty limiting.
That's certainly true, but I'd argue for 99% of the time, automatic saving is what you want.
The problem is that there hasn't been a good interface to represent that change history, which will allow me to prune dead ends, and visually identify the version that I want to use to start again from. I can't identify that revision as "the one from 1:52 pm" because I don't know when the auto-save happened. What I do know is that I want the one where I used the phrase 'When Sally Met Harry' in the third paragraph, but not the one where I used it in the fourth paragraph.
Remember - it has to work for non-technical users, so saying "just make it work like Git" won't fly.
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?
> App should just save automatically. Oh god please no. Apps that save automatically are the worst idea ever. I want to be able to make exploratory modifications, and then commit to disk AT A TIME OF MY CHOOSING. The computer doesn't know what I'm thinking, and it can't tell the difference between "messing around" content vs "serious" content. I can see it now: I hit undo a bunch of times to get back to a previous st…
Personally, I think in a perfect world there would be a more widespread distinction between "save" (something that happens automatically whenever changes are made, to "save" the data from some unexpected calamity like power failure) and "commit" (what you're talking about, which most people think of as "saving"). I doubt it would realistically catch on any time soon outside of tech circles, though, due to the confusion it could cause the average user - "New, open, print, commit, exit... now where the hell is the damn save button?!"
Do you really think about floppy disks when you save something? Most people don't. That's what makes it an effective symbol. You don't have to think, decipher, or read. Everyone has learned it and has become more productive by it. Why change that? Would it be wise to modernize traffic symbols as well? If you're going to try to force users to learn something new, there better be something in it for them (I don't see what that would be) and you would need just about every developer to agree upon and use this new symbol (good luck), otherwise you've pretty much asked Christians to change the cross symbol to a new modern torture device.
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?
Exactly. Save itself is the problem. Every change you make should be by default persisted. You shouldn't 'save' a current state, you should make named revisions you can roll back to easily.
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.
Certainly British, and probably European, usage. And yes, it predated electricity by quite some time, in fact said (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pawnbroker) to date back to the origins of banking in Italy.
Absolutely. Anyway, if skeumorphism is bad, and the floppy icon is so unrecognisable as to be abstract (which appears to be the 'problem' these designers think needs solving), doesn't that mean the floppy icon is now good?
> Anyway, if skeumorphism is bad, and the floppy icon is so unrecognisable as to be abstract (which appears to be the 'problem' these designers think needs solving), doesn't that mean the floppy icon is now good? The short answer is "No." The long answer is that the skeumorphism is bad argument is generally that trying to imitate some kind of physical analog of the computerized process you are doing isn't an effectiv…
In other words, it doesn't matter that it's the image of "a 3.5in floppy disk," it matters that that's a symbol that tells people "save."
> App should just save automatically. Oh god please no. Apps that save automatically are the worst idea ever. I want to be able to make exploratory modifications, and then commit to disk AT A TIME OF MY CHOOSING. The computer doesn't know what I'm thinking, and it can't tell the difference between "messing around" content vs "serious" content. I can see it now: I hit undo a bunch of times to get back to a previous st…
Personally, I think in a perfect world there would be a more widespread distinction between "save" (something that happens automatically whenever changes are made, to "save" the data from some unexpected calamity like power failure) and "commit" (what you're talking about, which most people think of as "saving"). I doubt it would realistically catch on any time soon outside of tech circles, though, due to the confusi…
Actually, it's the concept of 'save' that is unintuitive. The EPOC systems just kept your data, and it's one of the nice features that sublime gives you. In an ideal world, a document would keep its entire change history as a graph (not just a single line), and you wouldn't 'save' a copy, you'd name a particular revision of it so that it was easy to get back to later.