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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

I love those "save" icons with a floppy disk.

There's even an icon with a tape in that article.

Because in my experience it's the only save icon that's consistently used for the same purpose. Many apps use icons involving arrows for most common actions, and then I have to guess if that one icon is for downloading something, for saving the file or something else entirely.

Smartphones really need a tooltip replacement. Windows Phone 8 solved it in a consistent, intuitive way and it would be great if the other big players came up with something similar. Google and Apple have the power to push such improvements through the whole app ecosystem, but there seems to be no incentive.

On many Android apps I can long press an icon and get a tooltip.

Huh, you're right. Good to know it already has a system in place for that.

The floppy disk is a very enduring "save" icon. MS Word still uses it as do many other UIs.

I wonder what the kids coming up today think it is.

One could argue that the designers had it easier back then. A floppy is a pretty tangible thing. How would you symbolize saving today when almost no saves go to removable media anymore and the removable media that we still have come in all shapes and sizes? Saving something has become pretty abstract.

Upload? Perhaps a vertically flipped download button. Download is often just a fat, downward pointing arrow. I might add a cloud in there.

I mean I’m 30 and I have seen and used 3.5" floppies, but they were never the primary storage medium in my mind, so while I know what the icon shows, I’ve always pretty much thought of it as “save”. I doubt I have ever clicked that icon in order to save something to a floppy. There’s nothing wrong with it. Many kids today probably don’t know classic telephones either and even iOS uses one for the phone icon.

I think this concept is overblown. Even when floppy disks were common, the depiction of a floppy disk as an icon on a button required a bit of thought (or experience/training) to understand that it meant “save this file somewhere (maybe on a floppy disk).” It’s not like the icon automatically meant “save this file somewhere that you will choose” simply because people were more familiar with floppy disks.

The first Macintosh did not have anything else than floppy disk to save to. No hard drive. It was an obvious metaphor.

Also, in those days computers were usually not networked. If you wanted to transfer a file, you saved it to removable media. Commonly a floppy.

Your thought was "I need to save my file to this floppy here and give it to Jenny". It was a very obvious icon, top of mind, for people working with computers in those days.

There's a lot wrapped up in that icon:

- rendering a physical embodiment of the digital work - more specifically, making a thing you can hand to another person so they can use it - also specifically making a thing you can physically store somewhere "safe" - a distinction between temporary and permanent versions of the digital content

Today we don't use physical media for any of these things. Display, exchange and long-term storage can all be accomplished without going to the physical realm.

How else might we represent this graphically?

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