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Comment by utoku | Hacker News Reader

We use the floppy disk for the save icon, but we don't use floppies anymore. Just something that has been bothering me.

We also don't throw our floppy disks into a trash can to eject them, but that's what the "intuitive" Mac interface proposed, all those years ago.

If these things bother you, you probably shouldn't study etymology. Most words (and concepts) retain leftover residues of previous strata of meaning. Such is change...

  >> what the "intuitive" Mac interface proposed, all those years ago.

That was never intuitive. I thought that was a bad choice from the beginning.

Actually, studying etymology (which probably doesn't stand for icons yet) is fun because of that reason.

Even our letters are left overs from old icons. Alpha for the ox, Beta for the house. I am just suggesting that the floppy probably won't have its letter someday.

I have made a blog post related to the choice of metaphors for icons: http://www.iconfinder.com/blog/4/

You made a good point. Those floppy disk icons probably mean nothing to Gen X.

I'll refrain from using that icon on my websites/apps from now on.

What would you propose as a "save" icon?

Same button that closes the window. Seems to work for Mac OS X.

Then, you can't save a file and continue working on it in OS X?

There's menu and keyboard shortcut for that, but I don't recall ever seeing save toolbar item on Mac, except in products ported from Windows/Linux.

Save everything. Don't make the user click save. Even better if you can allow a rollback to any point in time. Better still if you can roll back to significant changes, with significant determined in terms of the domain context.

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