6 ms·
Hour glass, floppy disk, envelope, AA style battery for laptops, and now manilla folders go on the pile of icons that are too abstract for people to recognize a
by c3534l 6y ago
Hour glass, floppy disk, envelope, AA style battery for laptops, and now manilla folders go on the pile of icons that are too abstract for people to recognize anymore. What next, people won't recognize the sheet of paper for document anymore? Clipboards are probably already weird now.
- bookofjoe 6y agoalso telephone icon
- Someone 6y agoAnd ox head (https://www.britannica.com/topic/A-letter https://www.britannica.com/topic/A-letter) Who knows what these things will look like a few millennia from now.
- bbarnett 6y agoNice link, great info, thanks.
- efreak 6y agoAny idea what this quote means? > In the Phoenician alphabet the letter stood for a species of breathing, as vowels were not represented in the Semitic alphabets. What exactly is a _species of breathing_?
- c3534l 6y agoSome kind of typo or misunderstanding. "A" represented the glottal stop, not the vowel sound. Maybe the person who wrote that article was struggling to explain what a glottal stop was? Either way, its nonsense.
- dredmorbius 6y agoReference?
- culturestate 6y agoIt's a pronunciation reference. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smooth_breathing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smooth_breathing and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_breathing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_breathing
- caf 6y agoEven electric vehicles use the AA style battery metaphor in their UI.
- kevingrahl 6y agoPerhaps not the best example for how abstract something is. The 18650 battery cells that most electric vehicles use looks very similar to an AA battery. You certainly couldn’t tell them apart from an icon.
- caf 6y agoA fair point. Do the lithium cells have the protruding button on the positive end?
- kevingrahl 6y agoApologies for the late reply, only just saw your question. In case you haven’t answered it yourself: Some appear to have the “button top” that you know from AA’s but most appear to omit those. But even those without the button top have a smaller contact on the positive side similar to the button top.
- efreak 6y agoSo do cellphones
- baddox 6y agoI don’t know if hour glasses belong in there. Surely those were already mostly decorative when the first hourglass computer icons were developed. Also, I would imagine that most young people still have to occasionally interact with envelopes (government stuff, maybe paying some bills) and cylindrical dry batteries (TV remotes, home thermostats).
- culturestate 6y ago> Surely [hour glasses] were already mostly decorative when the first hourglass computer icons were developed I was a toddler when these icons were created, but I can think of two notable exceptions: egg timers (which my family still used when I was a kid) and board game timers (the canonical example of which, in my mind, is the one that used to ship with Boggle).
- scotty79 6y agoI think when it comes to folders it's not due to time but rather regional differences. I don't think this particular style of folders is something that was popular in my country bureaucracies.
- satori99 6y agoI have heard anecdotally that a significant and growing number of children and young people have difficulty reading analog clocks.