21–30 of 72 posts
How about by picking a form that will always be in the past, and already well-documented and broadly understood, instead of trying to guess which of today's fads will be remembered?
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…
Even the word “phone” is interesting, I have a feeling people will continue to apply it to increasingly advanced portable personal technologies far into the future.
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?
(I certainly do)
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?
Are you talking about the "share" button? On Android this is three dots in an equilateral triangle, with two of three sides connected by a line.
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 confusing to the average person than a circle with line, space, longer line, space, shorter line, space, rest of circle is somehow more intuitive.
People use & all the time and don't know what it means. Hell, @ doesn't even have a clear definition! But people know what it means, and that's what matters.
How come people don't use a hard disk as a save icon? How come the icon of a CD didn't catch on as a "Burn" action?
Its not because these actions are any less actionable than "saving" to a floppy disk. Its because you can clearly tell WHAT a floppy is compared to other donut looking objects, and that is what matters!
You don't need to flatten the UI or make something you think looks like an IEC symbol (protip: the symbol you all use for on/off is IEC 5009 symbol for "standby"). All you need to do is make sure that the symbol is unique enough that it can't be confused for anything else. Having the added back story that it used to "be" something else makes it trivia fodder in 50 years.
Yes, Apple is stupid for making their calendar look like a book. No, I am not a knuckle-dragging cave man for thinking a floppy disk is a good symbol for "commit to disk."
Get off my damned lawn.
Alternatively, we could make autosave ubiquitous so the symbol is no longer needed.
I used to have vim autosave every time I changed focus. This worked really well, until I edited something which wasn't in revision control. That time I just cancelled the experiment, but maybe I should restart it and just autodetect if I'm in a repository or not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
but wtf is a "folder", now?
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)