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Ask Soylent: Which Iconograpy Represents 'Save' in the Modern World?

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday December 20 2016, @08:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the my-floppy-drive-still-works dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Our office recently updated to a new version of the Office Suite, and it still has an icon in the upper-left corner to perform the 'Save' function. Floppy drives have not been in use for years, and many children would not recognize a 3.5 inch floppy disk on sight. Programs have used this icon for years, because we have yet to find a suitable replacement. The CD/DVD can no longer represent saving, because they have come and gone. Even moving to the more abstract Piggy Bank icon would not work, because they are seldom used in the modern age. A USB Key icon may represent saving in some form, but the may not be around much longer if another medium gains favor. Does this mean that the venerable 3.5 inch Floppy will represent saving information to future generations, or should it be replaced by a different symbol?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:36AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:36AM (#443653)

    An arrow pointing down. It's (probably) being saved locally, not UPloaded somewhere-the-hell-else. If it makes you feel better the arrow could point down to an HDD/SSD.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:51AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:51AM (#443680)

    To me an arrow pointing down means either "go down one page or other meaningful unit" or "download". Please, don't overload that with yet another meaning.

    Actually, I guess for most people the best functionality would be to not distinguish between memory and disk version, but (have the illusion of) editing the file directly. That is, every change you do is immediately committed to disk. A backup copy is made on starting the program, to be able to revert to the previous version.

    Indeed, auto-save is already a rough approximation of this behaviour.