Icon search engine

Re:Icon search engine by scrrr on Monday October 25, 2010 @08:47AM (#1829546)

Nice service, just tried searching "save" and I find it funny that what apparently is the standard icon still shows a floppy disk. Somebody should survey 10 year old kids if they know what it means..

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Re:Icon search engine by natfriedman on Monday October 25, 2010 @10:28AM (#1829904)

We still use a Manila folder for a directory, even though people rarely use cardboard folders anymore.

In fact, we still call them Manila folders - but everyone's forgotten that the "Manila" part of the name comes from the fact that they were made from Manila hemp, a fiber produced in the Philippines.

Language is made of these kinds of artifacts - written, spoken, and visual language.

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Re:Icon search engine by chaosmachine on Monday October 25, 2010 @09:32AM (#1829700)

I think the floppy icon will stick around a while longer. How many times have you heard the rotary phone ringing bell sound used as a ring tone lately?

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Re:Icon search engine by CamperBob on Monday October 25, 2010 @02:40PM (#1830991)

You have a point there, but I suspect the actual reason for the rotary-phone sound's continuing popularity is that all of the other stock iPhone ringtones are lame as hell.

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Re:Icon search engine by charleso on Monday October 25, 2010 @10:03AM (#1829804)

Don't forget to ask about the copy-and-paste glue pot and brush (or artist's oblong wooden paint palette) while you're at it.

It's pretty common for the original meaning of symbols to disappear into the mists of time. Using a floppy for 'save' seems like a good one to add to humanity's set of 21st Century pictographs.

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Re:Icon search engine by count on Monday October 25, 2010 @09:24AM (#1829669)

Of course they know what it is - it's the 'save icon' :) Wait, it used to be real?!

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Re:Icon search engine by toddmorey on Monday October 25, 2010 @09:57AM (#1829788)

I'll bet before the floppy disk icon gets a chance to be replaced, the concept of manually saving files will be obsolete. It just might serve us 'til the end.

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Re:Icon search engine by stcredzero on Monday October 25, 2010 @01:40PM (#1830743)

Right. It's been long enough since it appeared in R&D labs, that orthogonal persistence should become the norm. OS X already has it in the System Preferences.

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Re:Icon search engine by ugh on Monday October 25, 2010 @10:46AM (#1829998)

I don’t think there is a Save command anywhere in the default iPad apps or the iWork apps. Even Office could easily switch away from forcing the users to save. They already have this nice, big menu with recent documents in their newest version, all they need to do is rework that into a sort of library of all documents. Then my dad, too, would no longer be confused by saving Word documents.

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Re:Icon search engine by wensing on Monday October 25, 2010 @10:51AM (#1830013)

I don't like it when 'Save' is greyed out on Google Docs. I'd rather have it auto-saving and removing an asterisk that indicates changes have been made. Then I could see that I don't need to save, but still get the satisfaction of mashing the little save button (which evokes a warm and fuzzy feeling of safety).

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Re:Icon search engine by danudey on Monday October 25, 2010 @09:53PM (#1832561)

Not sure if you saw it, but in Apple's 10.7 preview last week, they announced one of the new OS features as being 'auto-save'. Presumably, this means some kind of automatic saving infrastructure, rather than just telling developers they should be doing it.

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Re:Icon search engine by cabalamat on Monday October 25, 2010 @09:53AM (#1829765)

Well, motion pictures are still called "films". And letters still have serifs on them, despite the original reason for it (easier to engrave in stone) no longer being valid.

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Re:Icon search engine by wnoise on Monday October 25, 2010 @11:59AM (#1830303)

I'd really like a citation for serifs being easier to engrave in stone. That really doesn't make sense to me. I'd expect things like runes -- entirely straight lines, minimal decoration -- to be easier to carve.

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Re:Icon search engine by jiaaro on Monday October 25, 2010 @01:58PM (#1830816)

when you're using a chisel on stone. you need to hit it straight down, creating a divet (the serif) to get the cut started.

If you put the chisel diagonal and hit it with a hammer right off the bat, it just slides across the stone, and you usually hurt your thumb ;)

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Re:Icon search engine by wnoise on Tuesday October 26, 2010 @01:26PM (#1835124)

That doesn't seem all that implausible, but I'd expect the divot wouldn't need to be any wider than rest of the line.

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Re:Icon search engine by tuxychandru on Monday October 25, 2010 @01:13PM (#1830638)

The save icon on Ubuntu's default theme uses a downward arrow pointing at a hard disk. While not entirely relevant, even clear looks icon theme in Gnome uses a downward arrow pointing to a rack in a file cabinet.

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Re:Icon search engine by stcredzero on Monday October 25, 2010 @01:37PM (#1830735)

The save icon on Ubuntu's default theme uses a downward arrow pointing at a hard disk.

With the move towards Flash SSDs, even this is going to become quaint. If Apple keeps going the direction it is now, OS X or its successor is going to have orthogonal persistence cached on local SSDs and replicated in the cloud. Eventually, no one is going to even think about saving things anymore.

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