Re:Windows 8: List of all available AppBar icons
by pavlov on Sunday October 21, 2012 @08:31PM
(#4681335)
IMHO the floppy disk works better as an icon today than it did 10 years ago. When computers still had an actual floppy drive, it was potentially confusing that you'd click on the floppy icon to save to storage that 99.9% of the time would be the hard disk rather than a floppy.
Today the floppy doesn't represent a physical object anymore. It is literally an icon, a picture that stands for something on its own.
Compare with the pen and eraser icons: there is no physical paper on which to write (or erase) on a computer. In fact one of the primary goals of personal computing has been to rid us of pen and paper. This has not been reached yet, but maybe the day will come when a pen is as foreign to young people as the floppy is today... But I suspect that this stylized image of a pen will be still around then, with its iconing meaning ("Touch here to edit") only reinforced by the disappearance of the physical pen.
Today the floppy doesn't represent a physical object anymore. It is literally an icon, a picture that stands for something on its own.
Compare with the pen and eraser icons: there is no physical paper on which to write (or erase) on a computer. In fact one of the primary goals of personal computing has been to rid us of pen and paper. This has not been reached yet, but maybe the day will come when a pen is as foreign to young people as the floppy is today... But I suspect that this stylized image of a pen will be still around then, with its iconing meaning ("Touch here to edit") only reinforced by the disappearance of the physical pen.