Re: [Usability] Save Icon

Alan Horkan wrote: 
On Sat, 28 Jan 2006, Steven Garrity wrote:


Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2006 10:25:47 -0400
From: Steven Garrity <stevelist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Sarah Berry <sberry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: usability@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Usability] Save Icon

Sarah Berry wrote:

Thank you for your responses to my other suggestions.  Another
thought that has occurred to me is that the "Save" icon in GEdit and
other applications may no longer be appropriate.



There are regular calls for Gnome to completely kill off the concept of
manually saving.  The idea would be to save automatically like how
programs do on handheld devices, or smaller programs like Tomboy or the
Sticky notes applets do.

The immenant demise of Save has been predicted for decades now (I think
Alan Kay of Smalltalk fame mentions it regularly) but it is much easier to
implement manual save.  Hardly any (any?) large applications have
implemented full autosave and it tends to be used more to make regular
backups in case of failure. If you are going to provide autosave it must
be completely reliable if users are going to trust it.  I really dont
think save is going away anytime soon.


To kill off the Save action would imply to rely on some kind of smart
versionning system (think of the 'history' of Gimp, which allow you to
register a new "base image" from time to time). Indeed, "saving" means
you lost the previous version of your document with no way to get it
back. It's sometime a very risky action and I would not rely on a
sofware to decide instead of myself wheter or not the current document I
'm working on can be overwritten (for example when editing a config file)

Anyway, the idea of a standardized versionning system accross the
desktop sounds nice. But it would imply to have a "snapshot" button a-là
gimp. Perhaps is it easier to have a metaphor for it though.

1) The floppy disk isn't common anymore. There are lots of younger
people who will have grown up using a PC and have never seen a floppy disk.


For me any new icon is the worst of both worlds, you alienate those who
already know what they are doing and therefore make it very difficult for
new users to get help.


My brother and my sister use applications using that icon for ages and
know what it is for, despite they didn't see any floppy disk since a few
weeks ago.

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