Too bad, that popular Windows applications like Skype and Spotify have gone against this and made "X to minimize". And their making of Alt+F4 also to minimize drives me nuts.
X to close
61–70 of 204 posts
Re: X to close
#62Interesting, but the connection to symbols from Japan seems a bit dubious (or at least not very recent). The term "cross out", and hence the use of an "x" to indicate negating something, seems to have been in common use in English since at least the 1920s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cross+out
I was going to say the same. Surely people have been crossing things out in writing and art for a very long time.
Edit: According to etymonline.com, crossing things out dates to at lease mid 15th century: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=Cross
Re: X to close
#63As the article shows, the close button on MacOS classic was basically an empty box, but on mousing down on that box, it transformed into something that looks a bit like an x. I'm basing this on what I can see from using [1], but from my possibly inaccurate recollection of using the real thing in the 80s and 90s, some versions of MacOS had an even more "x like" mouse down image on the close button. [1] http://jamesfri…
Yeah, I was remembering this too. Of course, it also kind of felt like you'd "selected" the box. In fact, I think early checkboxes had x in them on Mac, didn't they? So it might have been a bit of a coincidence ... or an inspiration.
Re: X to close
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like Sony, being a Japanese company, originally intended for O to represent yes, and X to represent no. If you look at a lot of early PlayStation games, or most modern games released in Japan, that convention is apparent. The O and X buttons on the PlayStation controller even match the placement of A and B buttons on Nintendo's controllers, providing a clear analogue between the two. I'd be curious to know w…
> I'd be curious to know what caused that convention to change in the west. The XBox controller has a swapped A/B pair and uses A confirm B cancel.
The XBox controller is a clone of the Dreamcast controller. If you go back even further to the Megadrive, it had 6 buttons (on advanced controllers) with two rows of buttons - xyz and ABC arrayed from left to right.
When the Playstation 1 was released, the two consoles consumers could have been familiar with in the west were Super Nintendo and Sega Megadrive. SNES had the familiar ABXY, but mirrored with AX on the right. It used A for yes and B for no. The Megadrive had the aforementioned ABCxyz and also used A for yes and B for no. Meaning, one console used the bottom button for yes and the one on its right for no (Megadrive), while the other had the bottom button for no and the one on the right for yes (SNES).
So I doubt SONY copied the competition for their decision to swap the yes/no buttons.
Re: X to close
#65Wow, I had always thought the "X" was like an elevator close button. Sort of like a greater-than sign and a less-than sign put together: ><.
Re: X to close
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Japanese variants, he is correct. When Sony westernized the playstation controller, the O and X functionality was flipped. Sony is yet to comment on the reasons why.
It might be because of Sega's consoles, which were more popular in the US than they were in Japan, where Nintendo ruled. The Genesis' button layout was A,B,C arranged in a diagonal from bottom-left to top-right. A was usually 'accept'. The Dreamcast had a diamond with A at the bottom and B to the right. Nintendo's Famicom buttons read A,B from right-to-left, and that trend continued with the Super Famicom's diamond,…
SNES was also more popular than the Genesis in the west.
Re: X to close
#67The Acorn Arthur operating system, a precursor to Risc OS used a sort of fat X icon to close windows in 1987
Re: X to close
#68I misinterpreted the title as "X Windows consortium to close."
me too
Re: X to close
#69As an Atari ST user from 1985 to roughly 1993, I wasn't expecting the author would actually mention GEM/TOS. I was pleasantly surprised when I scrolled down and, lo, there it is. That said, since the "X" in this case is white on a black background, I always interpreted the icon as four arrows pointing inward to indicate a shrinking/disappearing motion. In fact, when you closed a window, GEM would play an (inelegant)…
I don't think there is much relevance in the Japanese argument. One funny detail is that Sony actually inverted in their games the meaning of Round and X for western markets -> making X act as "validate" and Round as "Back/Cancel", the exact opposite of what they do in Japan. As for "X being a true icon", I don't know. For me, it could stand as well as an abbreviation for "eXit" -> X. The AmigaOS Workbench used (and…
Was this true in all of their games? I know early PlayStation games did use O for confirm and X for cancel - even a few years into its lifetime, this was the case as Final Fantasy VII is an obvious example.
Re: X to close
#70"Vi, vim, emacs or edlin?
No [x] to close these 1980's text editors either. X was commonly used to delete characters in-line, but not to close the program."
Hmm... I've used :x to write+quit in Vim for years. And, :X is to encrypt+quit. Don't have a year when that was added though. Could be fun to try and dig that up.