I’m good with this future.
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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I'm starting a revolt if anyone ever changes my precious floppy disk icon. It's simple, clear, and truly iconic, don't fuck with it of ain't broke.
I hope it will never change.
It's just perfection. Can't confuse the icon for any new tech or process.
12/28/14
Ah, back when there was some hope for the future
The Twelfth of Sevigintber, Fourteen AD. It must have been a strange time. Oh, hang on, they were just indicating 2014-12-28 in USAian.
That makes way more sense. At first, I was like, holy shit, what planet has this MFer been living on the last 10 years? We're on our way to un-terraform earth here shortly for those of us not in concentration camps.
Climate Change as reverse Terraforming is such a good framing. I gotta steal that.
The symbol for settings is a cog, why does the floppy save icon get all the hate?
Because cogs/gears are still used pretty regularly while a floppy disk was made obsolete almost instantly when you look at a developmental timeframe, even by itself at one point.
I remember for a brief time Microsoft started using a CD as the save icon in their office applications.
They actually had to revert it to a diskette so people knew what it meant.
Well, a CD is an absolutely stupid symbol for writable media, because even the state of the art CD-RWs could only be written to about 1k times, the practical limit is much lower. It's just not the medium for regular writes.
If you ever want to make a greybeard feel old, find a floppy disk in his cupboard, hold it up and say, "Hey look, someone 3D printed a save icon!"
At this point I bet its more recognized as a save icon than as floppy media. I mean shit it's even a emoji it's that iconic 💾
What should we use tho? I'm wrackin my brain and i can think of nothin'
Maybe a chronograph or piechart and calling it Snapshot?
Loading would be rewinding, going back in time, so with a counterclockwise arrow?
A box with CTRL-S printed on it
(CMD-S for Mac users)
Symbolic icons should never use words to convey their meaning. Some of us are dyslexic, some of us don't speak the language, some of us are blind as shit, etc.
Tbf those aren't words, they're the labels of 2 keyboard keys
Labels composed of letters to form otherwise meaningful words, it's still not a great option in terms of user accessibility. If even a couple of icons used similar words/ letters as their iconography, then suddenly it becomes an irritating nightmare just trying to identify which is which without breaking the flow of what your doing. If anything, a simple S would be acceptable, but that brings its own problems
I was joking anyway. People who need the icon more often than not probably don't know the keyboard shortcut
LibreOffice has used an arrow pointing to a hard drive for a while, but that's also outdated.
The trend has been to move away from saving as a distinct action in favour of constant auto saving, so I don't know if canonicalising a wholly new icon is in the future.
The download icon might not be an awful choice in some contexts.
How about this?
If download can be represented as a horizontal line with a downward arrow above it, something similar to this seems the most suitable.
This makes me curious as to what proposals there have been for a universal save icon otherwise.
Saving data is a fairly abstract concept if you have no knowledge about computers. I have a difficult time thinking of something that someone who has never interacted with a computer could look at and come to an intuitive conclusion that the symbol means to save.
Maybe one of those life preserver rings? I guess part of the problem is that “save” has (at least) two meanings. To create a record of, but also to rescue. They’re kind of close, and certainly having a record of your data can rescue you, but yeah, the concept and its overlap gets “fuzzy.” Interesting question!
Life preservers are already associated with the "help" action
I thought that was usually a question mark or exclamation point. But I’m not a Microsoft user, so it might be different on the platforms I use.
Lol if a life preserver how bout a cross cuz Jesus saves
GTA2 vibe.
Hockey goalie mask & stick.
I've seen clouds ☁️ usedsometimes, usually with an up or down arrow in it, obviously for cloud save, but sometimes confusingly for upload/download.
Likewise, I've seen down arrows with a line ⤓ also used recently. (In xed text editor, came with Mint for me.) That also to me is more of a down/upload symbol.
I find the desktop skuimorphism pretty tiring anyway, especially after like 25 years of it. Will computers always and forever be an extension of the office?
I saw or read something recently talking about MS Bob, the ancient origin point for the much maligned font Comic Sans. But what's lost is what Bob was, why comic sans was made for it. It was a different view of the OS, the home PC, as a digital, animated home. You clicked the wall calendar to open your calendar, the TV to watch video, etc. Its also where clippy came from, originally a dog (who was a clippy option) that acted as a guide and buddy to the new system.
Squeak Smalltalk is also built different. Instead of folders and files everything is objects (years before Java claimed this). If you've never tried it, its a very different way to think about computing. Text documents aren't just files requiring a text editor, they become extensible objects with behaviors attached and definable. Smalltalk blurs the line between user, programmer, creator, and so on. It encourages you to look at the computer and the data on it playfully.
It isn't just the save icon or "files and folders and desktops" its every part of the computing landscape is constantly being defined by the worst, most boring, money-over-everything people. Computers are so much better when they're fun.
We'll probably see mor adoption of the bullshit autosave.