171–180 of 279 posts
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The question is why Facebook forces you to use an E-mail address as a user ID. Now THAT's amateur hour.
They don't.
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7233/7169306722_60b500bf36.jpg
Munch munch! It's fun to play stupid, right?
I always wondered what was wrong with English. You know, using 'print' instead of a 'what-does-that-box-of-kleenex-mean' icon? And for non-English speakers, is it really harder to learn what 'print' means than consulting a cheat sheet for what the icons mean?
The problem is that if we modernized most of our iconography, a heck of a lot of things won't be able to be represented simply with something distinctive enough. This is largely due to what I'll call the merging of things into the same form largely driven by computing. For example... Icon for a phone - rectangular screen Icon for a TV - rectangular screen Icon for a tablet - rectangular screen Icon for a camera - rec…
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 is awfully condescending towards people in their twenties and younger. > Want to indicate Settings or Setup to a twenty something? Show them a tool they've never used in their lives. > If you don't know who Johnny Carson is, how could you know that this is a old-style microphone? > No one under 30 has seen a Polaroid in years but we keep using them for icons. We don't live in a cultural vacuum where everything t…
Indeed, the author seems out of touch with the state of 20-somethings right now - if anything present-day 20-somethings are the most Polaroid-obsessed generation in quite some time. The market for old, restored Polaroid cameras has exploded in recent years. That iconic Polaroid camera icon on Instagram is quite recognizable to the youth of today.
As iconography this seems hardly relevant. When's the last time the author used a magnifying glass for real? Hell, even in the old days how often did people ever use magnifying glasses? But it certainly has no trouble being the universal symbol for "search".
This is the power of iconography - they are not the objects from which they are derived, and over time and use they take on meaning of their own.
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…
* ...because they're called folders, and we know how to use them?* Historically they were called directories , which I would love to see a return to from the wrong and infantilizing "folders".
1: filesystem > directories > files 2: Desktop > Folders > Documents
They're both models for (basically) the same thing. The technical incorrectness of folder doesn't interfere with usage in real scenarios, unless you expect Average Joe to be structuring data as opposed to, say, collecting media. Granted, if Average Joe had mild OCD and thought of everything he did as indexes and references to some abstract node then directories clearly makes more sense, but that would be a separate system divorced from the desktop abstraction.
Edit: Being young of course none of this is really hammered in by convention– maybe that's why I don't mind the two abstractions coexisting. Even if the terminology originated in a Windows era, it doesn't bother me in the least that Mac (and others) use it as well (for the reasons stated above).
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Not sure what the gear is you mention, but I can't think of another company that has Apple's drive for intuitive UI, which is the fundamental purpose of icons. In contrast, HN is a text-dominant application designed for text-dominant users...
Innovative doesn't mean intuitive - why is pinch zoom? Wouldn't it be more intuitive for pinch to close an app - after all you pinch things closed ?
Pinching to zoom in and out makes a lot of sense in my mind. Place your thumb and index finger at two points on a map/image/website. Those two points are two corners of a visual area. To make that visual area larger, expand the points outward. To make the area smaller, pinch inward. This conceptual mapping is very straightforward.
Isn't the whole idea of updating traditions a little silly. They're traditions. We don't follow them because they make sense. We follow them because the people before us followed them.
100 years from now we'll still need a symbol to conceptualize saving something. The other ones might go away but we'll probably still need to save our work. I expect the floppy to still symbolize this. The users at the time will not understand what a floppy is. But unless there is good reason to upend convention why bother.
Just look at all the linguistic idioms we retain from yesteryear.
I don't have any axe to grind with icons. But tradition is nothing to sneeze at. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words.
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..)
And crashed beige boxes for Windows machines mounted on Macs: http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2007/10/generi.... :-)
Why do we even have a save icon function anymore anyway? Just to torture people who forgot to save their file? Google Docs doesn't have a save button because it is saving all the time . Why would you not want to save what you are doing? Why is not saving the default? (Alan Cooper made this argument in About Face in 1995.) Also, if you want to talk about outdated terminology, theres "disk" and "drive". These are being…
Because the document is public, and you don't want work-in-progress to be shared until it is complete?
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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?
