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 The CD/DVD can no longer represent saving, because they have come and gone.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?
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @08:42AM
"Which Iconograpy Represents 'Save' in the Modern World?"
... a cross?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @08:52AM
Shouldn't cross mean execution?
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:38AM
Execute a save.
Christ on a cross, you got it in one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:22AM
Wow. Parent should be +5 funny. This is why I read at 0. Thank you AC parent for the irl lols!
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:08AM
A picture of Martin Brodeur.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @04:23PM
Funny enough, that was my first thought. Never quite the same after they designed the trap for him, however.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @08:48AM
Seriously, does it really look like I give a fuck what icon you like, or don't like, or want replaced? Children? They see that image of a floppy drive, ask Mom, Dad, or Teacher what it is, and they are told that it's the "save" button. That may go unchanged for a decade, a century, or a millenium. And, who gives a fuck?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Francis on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:27AM
That's more or less how the Chinese got their characters. However, in this case not only do you have the option of asking for help, but there's usually a tool tip available and with a properly designed UI, it would also be available via a menu as well as the appropriate hot key.
It's astonishing to me that people seem to think that Idiocracy was the goal and not a cautionary, if humorous, tale.
(Score: 2, Informative) by boris on Tuesday December 20 2016, @03:47PM
Exactly. My 5 year old knows what "roll your window up" means even though he's never seen a manual window in his life.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 20 2016, @05:07PM
Roll your window probably dates back to mica sheet windows which were literally rolled up and down.
Their modern rigid glass counterparts have the opposite directions for open and closed, but wouldn't you "crank your window up, or down" if you were putting a literal label on the hand cranked windows? (which, 3 out of 4 vehicles in my household still have, though they are all from the last millenium.)
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Tuesday December 20 2016, @07:24PM
"Oklahoma", "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top", 1943: "With isinglass curtains you can roll right down, In case there's a change in the weather. "
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @08:50AM
All is cloud.
Download : down arrow with underline
Upload : up arrow pointing at cloud
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:20AM
Actually I quite like this. Even locally the analogy makes sense; you can think of your active program/work in the RAM being sent down to the disk or brought up into active use.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by rleigh on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:00AM
This has been in common use in various GNOME and KDE themes for years: green up arrow for "open", red down arrow for "save". No cloud in this case.
I was never a big fan of the floppy "save" icon when it originated. It demonstrates everything that's wrong with icons: that they are a poor substitute for written verbs describing an action. The only way it was discoverable was the addition of tooltips to describe them, and the corresponding icon next to Save on the File menu. The purpose should be implicit if they accurately represent the action, which a floppy disk does only vaguely. Why isn't it open? Why do open and save icons not have an obvious relationship?
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:34AM
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @12:34PM
How about a picture of evaporation and one of rain? /jk
(Score: 5, Insightful) by tfried on Tuesday December 20 2016, @08:57AM
No, seriously. Never, ever replace a symbol that everbody understands, just because nobody knows where it came from any more. And I am sure if you were to ask a random sample of people to identify the "meaning" of a bunch of common computing symbols, the "floppy"-icon would be probably come out on top of all other icons.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:00AM
Obviously the save icon should be a crying brown child.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tfried on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:42AM
I appreciate the humor in your comment, and I share your sentiment that Unicode has unnecessarily entered muddy waters.
However, you are overshooting the mark. It's perfectly ok and useful to try to modernize existing icons. In the case of the floppy-icon, I'm sure you've seen hundreds of versions of it in your life. Not all of them good, but some really useful enhancements. Made to be discernible in grayscale, for instance, or abstracted to a clearer shape that is easy to recognize at small sizes, etc. And if - e.g. the dominant(?) blue color of the icon were to be associated with one single vendor of physical floppy disks, I could in fact understand a motivation for experimenting with different colors, too. The important thing is: All these variations are still easily recognizable as instances of the same prototype. Thus their meaning is known. Replacing it with something different all-together will wipe the existing association, which is why a complete re-design should be reserved for cases where the icon simply "does not work", i.e. is not understood at all, or - worse - misunderstood to mean something different.
As such, if you are into emoticons, and ASCII-art is not good enough for you, then - from that questionable starting point - it's almost a logical consequence that you will have dozens or hundreds of variants of each emoticon. Again, no problem as long as each instance of a given emoticon is still recognizable. And as long as you don't expect text-based online editors and even character encoding standards to support your crooked need for graphics.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:22AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Funny) by barbara hudson on Friday December 23 2016, @12:47AM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:08AM
I'm so happy you don't work for me.
Not only are you some braindead moron who uses an "Office Suite" instead of LaTeX and friends, you apparently think it's worth your time to talk about whether or not some symbol is appropriate for some action.
Tell me, please, what word would be adequate for "mother"? "Mama" is just some mangling of baby screams, so it's not a proper word, and it's unsuitable for the modern human.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:20AM
Tell me, please, what word would be adequate for "mother"?
"Bitch"
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @01:24PM
I prefer stupid cunt.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:21AM
The icon is a "save" icon, and even though I'm old enough to not only know floppies, but even to know 5.25" floppies, when I see the icon, I don't think "floppy", I think "save". That's the meaning of the icon, and there's no more problem than there is with an icon showing a man and a woman telling you that there are toilets for men and women, and I've never heard the complaint that the icon doesn't actually show a toilet.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:41AM
Git orf moi lorn!!!
http://fatphil.org/images/8_inches_of_pure_floppiness.jpg
(sorry, that's an old one, I'm not in the office at the moment, so can't take a fresh photo. Other historical ones include http://fatphil.org/images/im_floppier.jpg and http://fatphil.org/images/floppy_pipe.jpg )
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:24AM
Actually, the bathroom icons are confusing for handicapped. If there is a woman and a wheelchair, is it fine for guys in a wheelchair to use?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:29AM
But that would not be improved if the icon would show an actual toilet, would it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:28AM
Put a damn picture of a bar beside the toilet? It's not hard to be clear, either...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @01:21PM
So would that bar besides the toilet mean "only females", or would it mean "all handicapped"?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday December 20 2016, @03:31PM
A bar? Like, where you drink alcohol, or a pipe [wikipedia.org] like an OR statement? I don't follow.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by pTamok on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:32AM
Coming from a VAX/VMS background, I have never understood why overwriting an existing file should be regarded as saving information. Most implementations of 'Save' I have encountered overwrite an existing file. The approach taken by the RMS filesystem on VMS was to write a new copy of the information in a new file, and increment the file version number by one. You had to explicitly purge older versions to get rid of them (there were, of course, automatic mechanisms to do this if you chose). MS-DOS did not have automatic file versioning, and the rest is history (until recently, where NTFS can implement versioning).
The current 'save' action should really be labelled as 'overwrite', and 'save as' actually be 'save'. 'Save as...' could also usefully prompt with a filename that had an autoincrementing version number (or equivalent).
Taking a large document, making some changes, then saving, usually means that the revision before the changes is lost. Some developers have included functions like change journalling and hidden backup versions, and some filesystems do simillar 'hidden' backups or implement checkpoints, but it is all pretty piecemeal.
The lack of good, stable file versioning in Linux has led me to look seriously at using NILFS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NILFS [wikipedia.org] ) as a filesystem. It is not exactly mainstream, but it has some very interesting attributes.
NILFS supports continuous snapshotting. In addition to versioning capability of the entire file system, users can even restore files mistakenly overwritten or destroyed just a few seconds ago.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by FatPhil on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:55AM
And before you accuse me of speaking from a position of ignorance, I have used VMS, and the fact that it was unable to distinguish (because it didn't even try) between an old version that was worth archiving, and an old version that should be binned, convinced me once and for all that it was an anti-feature, more than a feature.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:22AM
I have used VMS, and the fact that it was unable to distinguish (because it didn't even try) between an old version that was worth archiving, and an old version that should be binned, convinced me once and for all that it was an anti-feature, more than a feature.
For me it was using VAX C and discovering that the regular files created by the standard i/o library were incompatible with the "record-based" files created by every other VMS application... The VMS devs never did get the message that a file system wasn't meant to be a DBMS (probably the same folk who later tried to replace the Windows file system with a relational database).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by pTamok on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:40AM
Well, I did use CMS* on VAX/VMS. Horses for courses.
I would continue to contend that the function implemented in most Office software is not 'Save', but 'Overwrite'. I take your point about being unable to distinguish between an old version worth archiving and an old version that should be binned, but I would suggest that perhaps you are looking for a function labelled 'Archive'?
Given the cheapness of disk storage, I would suggest, from a human interface point of view, that keeping a copy of all old versions is a viable, if not sensible insurance strategy, and if you are at all bothered by disk-space considerations, do a purge at a sensible time interval and with a sensible selectivity - which might possibly be set by the user, or a system administrator. You could explicitly set an automatic purge with keep=1 if you wished, and have the functionality you describe.
Currently, people operating office applications are able to completely trash their work by an inopportune 'Save' - this is not good. In a world where it is considered good practice to protect people from their mistakes, I would argue that creating a new copy each time 'Save' is invoked would be good practice, so rollback is possible (other methods of rollback could be used), and having both a 'Save As' function and an 'Archive' function would add belt and braces.
I haven't polled users to see if 'Save' operates in the fashion they desire, but the number of times I have had to restore old versions of critical documents for people who have saved changes that they didn't intend suggests something isn't working. NTFS does now allow you to restore previous versions of files, if you have that capability enabled, and know how to use it - however, many people operate on important documents held on USB sticks with FAT filesystems - including students writing theses.
The use cases: for a developer, who knows how to use a code management system; and and end-user, who probably doesn't know, and doesn't have access; are different. Developers are generally very computer literate, and are usually given access to the tools to do their job: end users often have to struggle with whatever they are given. Relabelling 'Save' as 'Overwrite' would help to prevent a number of occasions where people have shot themselves in the foot.
Thanks for your feedback. I agree, sometimes it was a chore finding which file version was the one that I wanted: but it was better than having to rewrite something because an accidental deletion had been made permanent.
*DEC's Code Management System.
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Tuesday December 20 2016, @07:32PM
Had to respond to "given the cheapness of disk storage". Back in the days we're all talking about, it wasn't. While being able to recover old versions of files is handy sometimes, it's not what you want most of the time. OTOH since in real life NO system actually overwrites the old copy - it really writes a new copy and then switches names, unless you work really hard at doing in-place operations (which only worked on certain hard drives) - keeping the old copy is not hard. OTOOH, leaving unlimited old copies around isn't such a good plan either. The solution might be simpler: we already tend to have a distinction between "save" and "save as"; if we just standardize as "save as" with an additional click to select "same name" (not just having it pre-filled-in) then it's as easy as it is now, and with the clarity you want.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @12:45AM
The "write new data stream, drop old data and swap names" is not what seems to be done by many coders. How do I know? Any fucked program that tries to save, fails for whatever reason (disk quota, process crash, hw powerdown)... and now you have no valid data at all, new or old. The filesystem may not overwrite, but from user space the data is gone/damaged and will require some luck and special tools to recover.
So no, too many coders don't even know how to properly replace file contents, even if the method was in computing litetature at least since early 80s. Every 5-10 years all the data dance with fseek, fsync, etc will hit the news but coders will quickly forget again, or even go silly like hitting fsync over and over ("I heard this keeps the data, DO IT!") instead of plan correctly how to balance integrity and speed.
(Score: 3, Informative) by theluggage on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:07AM
Coming from a VAX/VMS background, I have never understood why overwriting an existing file should be regarded as saving information.
OK, I've had a pop at VMS below, but, on reflection, maybe it was ahead of its time. With modern storage capacities, there's plenty of space for multiple versions or infinite undo histories... even with bulky files like video, images and audio you're mostly saving an "edit list" rather than multiple copies of the data. With a GUI you can display the "history" in a more useful way than VMS's "hello.txt;237".
Incidentally, Apple added file versioning to Mac OS years ago, and changed the Save/Save As.. protocol in their applications to "Save (this version)/Duplicate (create a fork)" with a time-machine-like scroll back through previous versions. Someday, MS Office and Adobe CS will support it and people may notice.
Then, one day, someone might come out with a version control system understandable by regular users - like "git" but, well, not like git [xkcd.com].
The "save" concept is already depreciated in many mobile apps, particularly on iDevices that hide their filesystem from the user. Instead, we have transparent auto-save plus an (emerging standard) "Share" button for distribution.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Pino P on Tuesday December 20 2016, @06:17PM
Then, one day, someone might come out with a version control system understandable by regular users - like "git" but, well, not like git
If you can buy something on a web shop, you can use Git.
Add to cart: git add somefile.txt
Check out: git commit -m "warn about kernel bug 107651"
Shipping: git push
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday December 20 2016, @06:20PM
The "save" concept is already depreciated in many mobile apps, particularly on iDevices that hide their filesystem from the user.
I have lost data in Newton OS, the predecessor to iOS. NewtonWorks auto-saved without saving more than one level of undo. I accidentally selected all, deleted everything, and did something else that counted as a separate action, and my document was gone.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @03:25PM
journaled filesystems motherfucker, do you speak it
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @05:00PM
I expect the future is "auto-save" with auto-versioning, similar to VAX/VMS, such that one doesn't have to press a button/icon to save. Saving is an ingrained habit for many of us, but if you think about it, we shouldn't have to explicitly keep asking for saves. Young people may even be able to forget there is a "Save" button in things like word-processors. You wouldn't need one except under rare circumstances. If you are using a memory stick (flash drive) and yank it out too quick, you may have a problem, but if storage copies are automatically done say every 7 seconds, then all you have to do is wait 7 seconds. Or close the document.
But unlike VAX/VMS's way of doing it, older versions may get gradually purged based based on frequency distance. In the background, minor changes or versions may gradually disappear (unless explicitly saved or overridden). The older something is, the less likely you need very specific sub-versions.
For example, 5-minute snapshots may get deleted after 1 day, then 15-minute snapshots deleted after 3 days, hourly snapshots after 1 week, etc. If the disk (storage) is getting full, you may be prompted (warned), and elect more aggressive version purging to continue, with the downside of less-frequent versioning snapshots.
I should point out that things like word-processors may have to change the way they store sections. Each paragraph my have to be treated like a record in a database instead of have one giant RAM image of the document. Otherwise, auto-save could be too disruptive because it's writing a fresh copy of the entire document on every version archive cycle.
In MS-Access there is no need for "save" for "direct" data entry because it uses chunk-based updating. This confuses data entry users at first, but they get used to it and like it. Word-processors and spreadsheets could use similar technology so the auto-versioning is only working on the record level. The risk of reference corruption (bad pointers) perhaps goes up, but full document copies would also be periodically made, similar to copying the .MDB (or .ACCDB) file in MS-Access say every 15 minutes. Thus, if the pointers get fubarred, you have a prior full-document version and lose no more than 15 minutes of work at the most. (Pointers should be checked for orphans or type mismatches by the system on full-doc save to catch any corruption early.)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @05:44PM
I started word processing on a Z-80 CP/M system, with an Emacs/Scribe offshoot called Mince/Scribble, later integrated as FinalWordII then sold to Borland and renamed Sprint. It opened a "swap file" on disk when it started and it was possible to set the time increment for fast incremental saves to the swap file. If something crashed, there was "FWRecover" which could unscramble the swap file (I believe pointers to short chunks of text) and restore the session including multiple editing buffers. Even on old, unreliable hardware, I don't think I ever lost more than a few seconds of typing.
Shutting down and restarting up again put me where I was before, state of editing buffers all saved in the swap file. When I was at a suitable stopping point, then I would "save' to keep a good copy (yes, this was actually "overwrite").
Moving to MS-Dos and "office suites" was demanded by customers for interchangeability, but I've always felt I lost a lot when moving away from FinalWordII.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @08:10PM
But you should still be able to save. Because if you don't do the save but the system does it unpredictably you aren't always sure what version of the document was actually saved. More so if the system crashes or similar.
e.g. you are in the middle of a change that should be "atomic" and the system saves and the power goes off. Now your document is in an inconsistent state. Of course if you use version control you can rollback etc, but we're talking about normal folk.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:36AM
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
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.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by gringer on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:42AM
We don't stop using words, letters, or characters because most people have forgotten their etymology. I don't think we should stop using icons as a representation of a concept because the thing the icon was derived from is obsolete.
.... I'm pretty sure the chinese symbol for 'car' isn't a teardrop shape with wheels.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA [youtube.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:49AM
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Touché) by shortscreen on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:01AM
I'll take a menu item labeled with the word "save" and a keyboard shortcut which performs same.
If you don't like floppy disks but insist on including a picture of something you can use a portrait of your mom.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Dr Spin on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:16AM
What is this obsession with making computers "useable" by pre-school children?
Lets just get rid of the whole Icon/emoticon stupidness.
There is nothing wrong with using WORDS in menus. The computer user can be guaranteed to be able to read to a basic level, and the computer can be set to a language he/she understands, otherwise they would not have got to the point where the need to save anything.
If you really need to learn a whole new set of symbols to communicate, why not use Kanji? at least it has been tried and tested - and half the world's population can already understand it.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by kazzie on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:33AM
Lets just get rid of the whole Icon/emoticon stupidness.
There is nothing wrong with using WORDS in menus.
Sure there is: it increases the translation costs.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Pino P on Tuesday December 20 2016, @05:55PM
You still have to translate each icon's tooltip.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:38AM
What is this obsession with making computers "useable" by pre-school children?
Its a euphemism for making adults able to understand what their pre-school children are doing with the computer.
There is nothing wrong with using WORDS in menus.
Which is generally what happens: words on menus, with icons as "short cuts" for use on toolbars etc. where screen space is at a premium.
If you really need to learn a whole new set of symbols to communicate, why not use Kanji? at least it has been tried and tested - and half the world's population can already understand it.
...while the other half of us, who weren't exposed to Kanji from an early age, struggle to tell many of the characters apart, let alone attach meaning to them.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:37PM
Kanji, with subtly different meanings in different languages.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @01:51PM
I'd also like to know which jackasses thought that an "incomplete box with an arrow pointing into it" is supposed to intuitively indicate "log out" and that "three parallel horizontal lines" is supposed to represent the Menu.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Tuesday December 20 2016, @07:11PM
I've never seen arrow pointing into the box for log out (that I can recall), but I'be often seen it point out from it.
However - the two symbols yoy mentioned makes a lot of sense...
* arrow and box - indicating travelling through a door that's ajar (like on emergency exit signs). So it is a generic "exit"/"leave" symbol.
* three lines - generic for "list", and a menu is a list of items.
The weird thing is that we don't see both of those more for other lists (the odd arrows we use for expand/collapse are strange - having three lines for expand and a single line for collapse would make more sense), or as other senses of heading elsewhere (would make more sense than the circle-with-line that we use now for suspend/logout - the circle-with-line is more apt for a hard shutdown)
(Score: 1) by AssCork on Tuesday December 20 2016, @07:05PM
The computer user can be guaranteed to be able to read to a basic level
Oh man, you do know there's an "Internet", right?
The world beyond your web-browser extends beyond the bastion of grammatical correctness and eloquent prose that is Soylent.
Just popped-out of a tight spot. Came out mostly clean, too.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:29AM
We have plenty of outdated technical terms that still have valid understandable meaning. We "dial out" of corporate phone networks. We "film" video "footage" and record things "on tape". It's not different than "digging" into problems or "spinning" tunes. Those pesky kids on our lawns can handle legacy terms, and they can handle the concept of putting a file "on disk".
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday December 20 2016, @02:46PM
A punched card icon would work for Save.
Revolver, or semi automatic modified to be fully automatic -- which is best for senior citizens in their porch swings?
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:37PM
A punched card icon would work for Save
That was NOT my experience of punched cards. ISTR keeping copies of my card decks on 556bpi magtape.
(The tapes were still readable 30 years later, and probably still are, though I no longer have a 7-track stop-start tape drive).
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday December 20 2016, @05:01PM
I used to specify cylinder numbers in JCL on the IBM systems a long time ago. That seems missing from my "save as" pop ups.
"save" is pretty much obsolete as a concept. The concept of a database transaction needs to be "saved" (oh the pun) for weird situations, but most people are OK with occasional background database "insert" operations.
I think google docs/drive has a save button somewhere but implicitly it periodically saves and thats good enough.
Another interesting analogy is my wife never backs up her mac, I just make sure the time-capsule thingy is doing its snapshots.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:42PM
I believe the cylinder numbers in JCL ware to indicate the number of cylinders, bot which cylinders. Relevant in a system where data base indexing was managed by the hardware more than the software.
(Score: 5, Funny) by dyingtolive on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:38AM
How about an icon that shows the characters, ":w!"?
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:56AM
If anything, the icon should show "C-x C-s"!
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday December 20 2016, @01:03PM
what does a serious emoticon with two noses and broken tooth have to do with saving?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Funny) by dyingtolive on Tuesday December 20 2016, @03:48PM
Is that what you see? I see a talking chicken head on a dinner plate. Totally makes more sense that way!
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:48AM
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?
The fact that you're asking this years after the floppy disappeared from the mainstream is pretty good evidence that the symbol is now firmly associated with "save" and that nobody has come up with a good alternative.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Francis on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:32AM
Nonsense, if MS and Mozilla have taught us anything is that it's never too late to take a perfectly serviceable UI and bollocks it up because that's the trendy thing to do. Never mind if it looks like shit, introduces a radical and incompatible paradigm and means that you have to relearn the entire UI without any meaningful gain.
If you don't like it, then you're clearly an old fogey and it's not the fact that the change sucks the llama's dick.
(Score: 1) by tekk on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:55AM
Seriously, the floppy is exactly what's needed now because it's transcended the physical meaning, it's universal, unambiguous (now) language for save. I'd wager that my youngest brother knows it only as "the save icon", and there's a pretty famous thing about kids freaking out because "Whoa, someone 3d printed a save icon! Cool!"
(Score: 1) by Burz on Thursday December 22 2016, @12:17AM
If you're going to preserve an image of outdated hardware, at least use the original symbol... the cylinder or drum. IBM and Lenovo have used it into the 2010s, with an arrow pointing to it or away from it. Today, the cylinder represents the abstract idea of a "storage volume" rather well (e.g. it looks like a volume of something).
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:00AM
Saving files is copyright infringement. So maybe a set of iron bars or a lawyer?
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:32AM
How about a lifesaver? (The buoy [wikipedia.org], not the candy [wikipedia.org].)
(So what if it's currently being used as a "help" icon? I'm sure that the hipsters, who are busy redefining how we do things with computers, will find a plausible reasoning, to explain how we've been using it incorrectly all this time.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ledow on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:39AM
It doesn't matter. So long as we're consistent.
What does the power icon represent? It's an incomplete circle with a line through it at the top.
Play, fast forward, etc. might "make sense" but pause and stop don't, especially the distinction between them. But EVERYONE uses the same icon, so it's fine.
And any play-on-words (piggy banks, lifejackets, etc.) doesn't work in any other language.
If you wanted a new icon, you go for a document, with an arrow putting it somewhere. It doesn't really matter where, so long as it indicates putting the document somewhere.
But the fact is that it really doesn't matter, even if it's an outdated storage medium, so long as we're consistent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:42AM
You must work for or with the same idiots that create GNOME.
The GNOME method: Lets make gratuitous changes to the UI that no one understands just because we can
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @12:03PM
Why not use a chest or box?
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Tuesday December 20 2016, @06:25PM
or a safe?
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Tuesday December 20 2016, @12:19PM
I've used probably thousands of different applications over the years. From early programs where "save" was some obscure key combination only discoverable by reading a thick manual that didn't yet even use the term "save", to dumbed down Fisher-Price style applications where the only way to figure out how to save is to click on dozens of random looking icons.
It is always difficult to communicate the meaning of a function, and the same function may behave differently between different applications. (A word processor Save may behave differently than a database Save, for example). Boiling it down to one word, or a picture is not easy, really requires a large amount of acceptance and standardization between people and applications, and sometimes gives new meaning to that word or symbol in itself.
Anyway, over the yeas I have found the best use of icons were to supplement text labels, not replace them. I can't even count the number of applications where I'm left guessing "what does this odd vague shaped toolbar icon do?". Apple hit the nail on the head with drop-down menus, and standardized "file", "open", "save" terminology, and the occasional 3.5" disk icon supplementing them. Others copied this way of doing things not because it was cool, stylish, or technically most efficient, but because people easily understood it. It became part of the "language" of computers.
I have to groan every time I hear about some dumb marketing turd trying to make a major change to a time-tested user interface. They might as well just change the language from English to Japanese!
Microsoft made a major fuckup by iconzing everything in to that damn "ribbon". If they weren't almost the only game in town, that would have killed their office product by now. The ribbon interfaces is useless and everybody hates it. (Given the other major fuckups in the Windows 8 and 10 user interfaces, they are clearly trying to put themselves out of business). I'd fully expect a future version of Microsoft Office to do away with all language ports and replace them all with a Microsoft bastardized form of Esperanto. They are so isolated from their users they won't even see a problem with that.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by xorsyst on Tuesday December 20 2016, @12:39PM
Why is anyone clicking save any more? What we really want is the application to auto save all the time, including saving the undo history. There should be no need for an explicit "save" action at all!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Lemming on Tuesday December 20 2016, @05:38PM
Indeed. This is the philosophy Apple follows since some time. If you close an application like a word processor, and open it again, it looks exactly like when you closed it, including all the documents you had open. When you close a document it is saved automatically. You won't get a dialog asking you to save. The only time you are prompted is when you close a new document which has no file name yet. Even closing the app with new documents open won't give you a prompt, the next time you open it your "Untitled" documents will still be there.
And they extended their Time Machine interface to work inside applications, so you can go back to previous versions of a document. You can even copy/paste parts of an old version into the current one.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday December 20 2016, @06:00PM
What we really want is the application to auto save all the time, including saving the undo history.
Then let me rephrase: What should the icon for "make a copy of the file without any embarrassments that may be present in the undo history" look like?
And in a lot of cases, "what we really want" is impractical on the hardware we have today, such as limited SSD space or HDD write delays or lag from having to deeply copy the undo history to a new thread for serialization after every brush stroke or every word you type.
(Score: 2) by xorsyst on Wednesday December 21 2016, @09:24AM
What we really want is the application to auto save all the time, including saving the undo history.
Then let me rephrase: What should the icon for "make a copy of the file without any embarrassments that may be present in the undo history" look like?
You mean 'publish' or 'export'. Good question, I don't think there tends to be a standard for that. But it's definitely not "save" - as anyone who has ever received word documents by email will attest to.
And in a lot of cases, "what we really want" is impractical on the hardware we have today, such as limited SSD space or HDD write delays or lag from having to deeply copy the undo history to a new thread for serialization after every brush stroke or every word you type.
I don't believe this argument for a minute on anything other than massive video editing.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday December 21 2016, @02:09PM
So I take it that for any media type anything other than video, all desktop, laptop, tablet, and smartphone devices sold in the past few years have the CPU speed, the storage speed, and the storage capacity to store the entire edit history of a document, drawing, or painting from blank page to the present in enough detail to recreate a movie of its creation, and saving this history in real time up to the second as it is being edited will introduce zero lag to editing. Is this your claim? Have you made or even used a free application for a free operating system that offers this functionality, and if so, which?
If so, operating systems will need to make the "publish" action automatic because as I understand it, version control systems such as Git expect to see the published version.
(Score: 2) by jbWolf on Thursday December 22 2016, @04:31AM
I don't mind the option for others, but I personally don't want it. Why?
For privacy reasons, I would not want my undo history saved on all files.
Also, I have the unusual approach to actively work on documents for more than a decade. (Now approaching two decades for some.) I don't want all the baggage from that long ago cluttering up my file uselessly. If I do it, I'm not the only one.
And it would be insane to have permanent undo that cannot be turned off in Photoshop or video editing software.
Also, corruption. Microsoft Word can't handle anything with more than a hundred pages without corruption. Even LibreOffice bogs down at a hundred pages. Undo will just make those problems worse.
So, there are reasons.
www.jb-wolf.com [jb-wolf.com]
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday December 20 2016, @12:40PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @01:00PM
Icons waste less UI space than text.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday December 20 2016, @01:33PM
Au contraire, the CLI wastes no space at all.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday December 20 2016, @12:48PM
Wearing a crown of thorns, weeping in agony, desolate, nailed to a cross.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Funny) by Bot on Tuesday December 20 2016, @01:09PM
last time I checked, he did not save by being nailed, nor by dying, but by resurrecting.
A boulder half removed from blocking an entrance would be fine, so you don't have all that white jesus/black jesus/big jew nosed jesus issues.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Tuesday December 20 2016, @01:23PM
1. it's spelled Iconography.
2. the issue is easily solved by reintroducing the floppy, as a big SD card. One that you cannot vacuum by mistake if it falls down the desktop as it happens with normal and micro SD cards.
3. if you persist in the heresy, then substitute the floppy with the DB icon, the multi platter cylinder. Allows for clean design, is abstract, is familiar to old farts. If you want to refer to a database put a left right double arrow next to the cylinder, so it finally denotes a f.in' DB instead of the data, about time eh?
Bot has spoken, can climb down the cathedra nao.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:29PM
That's fine for a decade or two until SSDs have almost completely replaced magnetic hard disk drives.
Saving is really the inverse operation of opening a file, so it should maybe be represented by a document half inserted into a folder, accompanied by an arrow pointing into the folder.
Of course, if the paperless office ever takes over, folder, file and clipboard icons shall be also doomed if we follow the same line of reasoning!
Personally however, I subscribe to the mantra: If it ain't broke, don't fix it (or, to put it another way, Fuck Beta)!
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:48PM
No, it isn't. The inverse operation of opening a file (make your program show the contents of the file) is closing a file (make your program stop showing the contents of the file). The reverse operation of saving a file (replacing the contents of the disk file with the memory copy) is reverting a file (replacing the memory copy with the contents of the disk file).
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:04PM
Hmm, fair point, but an icon showing a file moving into a folder implies the data will persist inside the folder i.e. it is saved which would not be appropriate if you closed and discarded the document. The icon could always include two files, one outside the folder, if it bothers you that the motion into the folder implies the document will also be closed.
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @04:47PM
Iconize this [pinimg.com]
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Tuesday December 20 2016, @07:25PM
If you have to replace it then just replace the icon with one of a fullsized sd-card.
Pretty much the same function of the items (portable storage) and visually similar enough that you can mistake them for each other. And most people today recognize the adapter that comes with the micro-sd card.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @08:37PM
If you want a more traditional icon for "save", use an 8" floppy (80KB). I have several of them if you need a photo.
(Score: 1) by GreatOutdoors on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:22PM
Really.. a picture of Jesus, because Jesus saves.
As long as we are in the mood for changing things that do not need to be changed because someone is bored and wants to make their mark on history, let's change that pesky "X" character to a tee shirt because "close" sounds like "clothes", or make the minimize underscore a picture of an atom because it is small.
How about people apply their brains to real problems instead of falsely inventing new ones? There are plenty of problems in the world to solve and this isn't one of them.
Yes, I did make a logical argument there. You should post a logical response.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @03:47AM
Jesus saves, but Buddha keeps incremental backups :D
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @10:12AM
Kids wouldn't recognize what "icons" (letters) represent the "Sss", "Ay", "Vuh" sounds in your language, or what icons (characters) represents the "save" meaning (e.g. 保存 ). So should they keep being replaced by new symbols just because the reasons for the "icons" have been mostly forgotten, changed or no longer apply?
If you do things right in the future it won't be a floppy icon, it's a save icon/symbol.
p.s. yes I know the Chinese Gov change stuff from "traditional" to "simplified".
(Score: 1) by gOnZo on Thursday December 22 2016, @10:12AM
Elephants NEVER forget.
QED.