5 ms·

Icons look pretty good, always grateful for free stuff like this. Minor side: the first thing I typed into the filter box was "save" because I wanted to see ho

Icons look pretty good, always grateful for free stuff like this. Minor side: the first thing I typed into the filter box was "save" because I wanted to see how the designer thought about the whole "floppy disk == save" problem in a greenfield icon set. I thought it was even more remarkable (or just notable, I guess) that there's no Save icon at all, which really speaks to where the world is at around cloud-based web apps. Why require someone to click Save at all, right?

rootusrootus 6y ago
> Why require someone to click Save at all, right? It's like the 'close door' button on an elevator. Some people just want to feel like they are doing something.
- jeffhuys 6y ago
  The elevators I encounter daily have a working close button, are there ones that don't work?
  - bussierem 6y ago
    Many elevators have placebo ones. It might behoove you to test it out sometime - is the button actually working immediately or is it taking time after pressing (or multipressing) the button? Many elevators ignore the button and close when they want but people still think/feel like they were the cause.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > Many elevators have placebo ones As I understand, basically no elevators have placebo close door buttons, but some have ones that only function when the elevator has been placed in manual operation mode, which requires a special key and is usually only done for service, emergency operations, and other special circumstances, and in which mode doors do not close automatically.
      - yencabulator 6y ago
        You can find photos of elevator control panels where the "close door" button is falling off, and is revealed to be just glued on with no electronics behind it. So commonly the button has a special-operating-mode purpose, but not always.
  - marshmellman 6y ago
    Yes, I believe man are placebo buttons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo_button https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo_button
crooked-v 6y ago
> Why require someone to click Save at all, right? Because you're making many changes to a large form and a partial update could result in someone else using bad data.
- PrimeDirective 6y ago
  It was a rhetorical question
bromuro 6y ago
As i see it, modern OSs are trying to remove the idea of “saving”, which confuses most of non techies and it is actually obsolete most of the time. I still Ctrl+S automatically though:(
com2kid 6y ago
> Why require someone to click Save at all, right? Sometimes saving is a high latency operation. Sometimes you don't want to show others data as it is being edited, think product data for an online story. Heck the "reply" button beneath the text box I'm typing into right now is a form of "save". Paradigms matter! Saving was necessary for all disk IO for a long time due to technology limitations, but even now days it is still the appropriate paradigm for certain circumstances.
- derefr 6y ago
  > Sometimes you don't want to show others data as it is being edited, think product data for an online story. In modern CMS workflows (used by e.g. newspapers), the software will auto-save draft versions; while you then explicitly publish particular versions (or, more likely, submit particular versions for the next stage of the pipeline, e.g. editing) by changing your latest version's state in a drop-down. This process really has no analogy with saving per se. It's more like tagging a commit.
  - infogulch 6y ago
    Yes I agree that "draft" / "published" as a paradigm maps users' intentions better than "saved" / "unsaved", which is more like an implementation detail borrowed from apps exposing raw filesystem concepts.
- jyrkesh 6y ago
  Oh, I totally agree with you. I was just making an observation of the trend more than anything. I'm someone who does everything that I possibly can while offline, and I'm mostly in the camp that the "Save" button being a floppy is not much different today than learning how to pinch-to-zoom or click a mouse (i.e. there's an up front cost to learning it, but it's already ubiquitous, so why change)
allenu 6y ago
This is all true, but there's also no cloud or sync icon. (I suppose those only matter for native apps.)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Shorel 6y ago
> Why require someone to click Save at all, right? Think about commit in git. It is the logical evolution of the concept.
CoreyGinnivan 6y ago
Thanks mate! I've still got quite a few icons to release in batches. One is a floppy disk, but it won't be labelled as "Save" :D There's a few options to take, but these days it mostly comes down to the context of what you're saving, rather than the action itself. "Save Document", "Save Template", etc
plibither8 6y ago
This is interesting. Let's assume that I do require to use a Save icon and my usage makes sense. I can't think of a "better" icon to represent the saving action than a floppy disk right now. Of course, ten year olds today wouldn't probably understand its origins. But what in today's world could represent a platform-agnostic, general purpose, "Save" icon? A flash drive? SD Card?
achow 6y ago
There is no 'Bluetooth' or 'WiFi' icons as well. I'm not sure whether we can read too much into unavailability of certain icons.
yencabulator 6y ago
Consider a text field that changes a webhook destination URL. You don't want that thing to auto-save a half-typed "https://examp" https://examp" unless there's some secondary "Deploy" button -- which then really becomes the save button, with a different name.

rootusrootus 6y ago

> Why require someone to click Save at all, right? It's like the 'close door' button on an elevator. Some people just want to feel like they are doing something.

jeffhuys 6y ago
The elevators I encounter daily have a working close button, are there ones that don't work?
- bussierem 6y ago
  Many elevators have placebo ones. It might behoove you to test it out sometime - is the button actually working immediately or is it taking time after pressing (or multipressing) the button? Many elevators ignore the button and close when they want but people still think/feel like they were the cause.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Many elevators have placebo ones As I understand, basically no elevators have placebo close door buttons, but some have ones that only function when the elevator has been placed in manual operation mode, which requires a special key and is usually only done for service, emergency operations, and other special circumstances, and in which mode doors do not close automatically.
    - yencabulator 6y ago
      You can find photos of elevator control panels where the "close door" button is falling off, and is revealed to be just glued on with no electronics behind it. So commonly the button has a special-operating-mode purpose, but not always.
- marshmellman 6y ago
  Yes, I believe man are placebo buttons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo_button https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo_button

crooked-v 6y ago

> Why require someone to click Save at all, right? Because you're making many changes to a large form and a partial update could result in someone else using bad data.

PrimeDirective 6y ago
It was a rhetorical question

bromuro 6y ago

As i see it, modern OSs are trying to remove the idea of “saving”, which confuses most of non techies and it is actually obsolete most of the time. I still Ctrl+S automatically though:(

com2kid 6y ago

> Why require someone to click Save at all, right? Sometimes saving is a high latency operation. Sometimes you don't want to show others data as it is being edited, think product data for an online story. Heck the "reply" button beneath the text box I'm typing into right now is a form of "save". Paradigms matter! Saving was necessary for all disk IO for a long time due to technology limitations, but even now days it is still the appropriate paradigm for certain circumstances.

derefr 6y ago
> Sometimes you don't want to show others data as it is being edited, think product data for an online story. In modern CMS workflows (used by e.g. newspapers), the software will auto-save draft versions; while you then explicitly publish particular versions (or, more likely, submit particular versions for the next stage of the pipeline, e.g. editing) by changing your latest version's state in a drop-down. This process really has no analogy with saving per se. It's more like tagging a commit.
- infogulch 6y ago
  Yes I agree that "draft" / "published" as a paradigm maps users' intentions better than "saved" / "unsaved", which is more like an implementation detail borrowed from apps exposing raw filesystem concepts.
jyrkesh 6y ago
Oh, I totally agree with you. I was just making an observation of the trend more than anything. I'm someone who does everything that I possibly can while offline, and I'm mostly in the camp that the "Save" button being a floppy is not much different today than learning how to pinch-to-zoom or click a mouse (i.e. there's an up front cost to learning it, but it's already ubiquitous, so why change)

allenu 6y ago

This is all true, but there's also no cloud or sync icon. (I suppose those only matter for native apps.)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Shorel 6y ago

> Why require someone to click Save at all, right? Think about commit in git. It is the logical evolution of the concept.

CoreyGinnivan 6y ago

Thanks mate! I've still got quite a few icons to release in batches. One is a floppy disk, but it won't be labelled as "Save" :D There's a few options to take, but these days it mostly comes down to the context of what you're saving, rather than the action itself. "Save Document", "Save Template", etc

plibither8 6y ago

This is interesting. Let's assume that I do require to use a Save icon and my usage makes sense. I can't think of a "better" icon to represent the saving action than a floppy disk right now. Of course, ten year olds today wouldn't probably understand its origins. But what in today's world could represent a platform-agnostic, general purpose, "Save" icon? A flash drive? SD Card?

achow 6y ago

There is no 'Bluetooth' or 'WiFi' icons as well. I'm not sure whether we can read too much into unavailability of certain icons.

yencabulator 6y ago

Consider a text field that changes a webhook destination URL. You don't want that thing to auto-save a half-typed "https://examp" https://examp" unless there's some secondary "Deploy" button -- which then really becomes the save button, with a different name.