John Gruber Makes a Mistake

re: John Gruber Makes a Mistake

Charles — Sat, 15 May 2010 12:57:52 GMT

As has been mentioned by now, nobody of any consequence uses floppy discs any more.

The idea that a file would be saved to floppies came about when a computer was running entirely in RAM and you would have to write information to a floppy for it to be kept.

Obviously to make this icon relevant today, the image should be changed to that of a hard drive. Not that that would clear up the issue at hand, the icon still wouldn't make sense. Do _what_ with hard drive?

Ideally we need some kind of "Write to file" icon that people could recognise. Perhaps an arrow pointing into a file or something like that, coupled with an animation of the document being "sucked" into the file as it is written to the device it is put on.

re: John Gruber Makes a Mistake

Susheel Chandradhas — Fri, 14 May 2010 20:56:03 GMT

I have a simple point to make.

I have young cousins who are using computers these days. They've grown up in a computerised world where they've never even seen a floppy disc.

Quite likely that they'd ask if it was some kind flexible CD.

I refer you to "Spiny Norman" comment a few places above mine.

re: John Gruber Makes a Mistake

Michael — Fri, 14 May 2010 10:19:20 GMT

I was wondering if you've written in more detail about this (from your article):

<i>We face it so often, that we've expanded user experience (UX) as an engineering discipline within MacBU. We've made it coequal with the development, testing and program management disciplines, and are increasingly incorporating a variety of UX design techniques, not just usability testing, into our development process.</i>

I would love to hear more.

re: John Gruber Makes a Mistake

drakeman — Fri, 14 May 2010 05:33:34 GMT

@Geoff

Break open the casing for a floppy disk and then you'll see why they're called 'floppy'.

re: John Gruber Makes a Mistake

Geoff — Fri, 14 May 2010 04:14:35 GMT

Why are they called "floppy disks" anyway. They seem quite stiff to me.

re: John Gruber Makes a Mistake

Spiny Norman — Thu, 13 May 2010 02:24:01 GMT

I don't understand. What is a "floppy disk"?

re: John Gruber Makes a Mistake

keath — Thu, 13 May 2010 01:03:01 GMT

Overloaded toolbars are common in Windows and Java programs, but it doesn't make them a good idea.

Most modern Mac applications have stripped down the toolbar to just a few major, unique activities for that program. The really common stuff like opening or saving files is relegated to the menu with its corresponding system-wide keyboard shortcuts. A picture just wastes space and leads to a bloated interface.

re: John Gruber Makes a Mistake

R. Mansfield — Thu, 13 May 2010 00:55:42 GMT

On a tangental note, my work involves regularly taking a Word file and saving it with a different file name. Although I can add the "Save As" command to Word's toolbar, it's not an icon. It's just the words "Save As." This seems to directly contradict the localization issue mentioned in the post.

And the Office apps are not consistent in this. I can add an icon for Save As to the Excel toolbar, albeit it's a generic Excel symbol. But that seems preferable over Word's text button which seems out of place in the middle of all the traditional icons.

I seem to remember in an older version of Word--can't remember whether it was on the Mac or in Windows that had a Save As icon represented by a floppy disc with an arrow on it.

I really don't mind the floppy disc icon for Save. It's no big deal. But I'd really like an icon for the Save As function on my toolbar.

re: John Gruber Makes a Mistake

sambeau — Wed, 12 May 2010 21:36:28 GMT

The Floppy Disk Icon once made perfect sense.

Computers didn't have hard drives, just RAM. If you wanted to keep a document you had to insert a floppy disk and save to it. This was true of the original Macs (where Word began).

There is an argument that this was not the case by the time Word for Windows appeared, but by then everyone was trained to save to floppies,plus in many circumstances computers were being shared amongst multiple workers.

Only by Windows 95 had the icon start to lose it's metaphorical sense.

However: that is clearly 15 years ago. Time to move on.

re: John Gruber Makes a Mistake

Hamranhansenhansen — Wed, 12 May 2010 21:26:14 GMT

The right answer is you should remove the Save command and the floppy goes away with it. You're tracking changes, right? Why does the user need to Save at all? It's computer science, not document production.

Check out how Scrivener does it. The user just writes and Scrivener takes care of the details.

If you're going to keep Save, make the icon a monkey to represent millions of users pressing Save a hundred times a day.