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A few pixels is a very big cost when all you have is 640x480 of them. UI clutter affects usability too. I’ll grant that while Microsoft Office is the only plac

A few pixels is a very big cost when all you have is 640x480 of them. UI clutter affects usability too. I’ll grant that while Microsoft Office is the only place I can remember seeing save buttons over all those years, for most people throughout the 90s and 00s, Microsoft Office was all they ever used. It might as well have been synonymous with software to them. I suppose there was a window of time when screens were large enough to support gratuitous toolbars, but before autosave had become the norm, where it may have made sense. But now I’d go as far as to say requiring users to click a button or lose their work to be an anti-pattern.

warrenm 5y ago
I've seen save buttons in pretty much every application I've used that creates some kind of digital artifact stretching across multiple platforms (HPUX, Macintosh, Windows, various flavors of Linux) across the last close to forty years (first computer I remember seeing them on was a Mac 512K in ~1986 in MacWrite and MacDraw) No one said you are "requiring users to click a button" - it's an affordance to end users indicating more possible actions are available (and, probably, "good") Just like no one said you have to go to File->Save Or press [cmd]-[s] (or [ctrl]-[s] if you're not on a Mac) Sure - if you happen to enforce autosave, it's probably OK to remove the save button: but not everyone wants everything to autosave (probably more often than not, I expressly DO NOT WANT any changes I've made (visually or otherwise) to be expressed into the underlying file)
- Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
  I was thinking back to MacWrite and other Claris programs when I wrote my original comment. I just can’t remember any of them having any save buttons in their toolbars, and I can’t find any screenshots where they have them. I can only remember saving using ⌘-S or the File menu. Maybe they had save buttons in certain markets to make Windows users feel more at home? HyperCard of course didn’t have explicit saving at all, maybe that’s why I like that pattern so much today. Too bad it didn’t have the deep undo stack that modern applications have. Edit: it looks like ClarisWorks 5.0 may have introduced the button in the form of an arrow pointing into a folder, but that was a pretty late addition, and it doesn’t support the universality of the floppy as a save icon: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1821-clarisworks-5-0-with-5-0v3-update https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1821-clarisworks-5-0-wit...

warrenm 5y ago

I've seen save buttons in pretty much every application I've used that creates some kind of digital artifact stretching across multiple platforms (HPUX, Macintosh, Windows, various flavors of Linux) across the last close to forty years (first computer I remember seeing them on was a Mac 512K in ~1986 in MacWrite and MacDraw) No one said you are "requiring users to click a button" - it's an affordance to end users indicating more possible actions are available (and, probably, "good") Just like no one said you have to go to File->Save Or press [cmd]-[s] (or [ctrl]-[s] if you're not on a Mac) Sure - if you happen to enforce autosave, it's probably OK to remove the save button: but not everyone wants everything to autosave (probably more often than not, I expressly DO NOT WANT any changes I've made (visually or otherwise) to be expressed into the underlying file)

Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
I was thinking back to MacWrite and other Claris programs when I wrote my original comment. I just can’t remember any of them having any save buttons in their toolbars, and I can’t find any screenshots where they have them. I can only remember saving using ⌘-S or the File menu. Maybe they had save buttons in certain markets to make Windows users feel more at home? HyperCard of course didn’t have explicit saving at all, maybe that’s why I like that pattern so much today. Too bad it didn’t have the deep undo stack that modern applications have. Edit: it looks like ClarisWorks 5.0 may have introduced the button in the form of an arrow pointing into a folder, but that was a pretty late addition, and it doesn’t support the universality of the floppy as a save icon: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1821-clarisworks-5-0-with-5-0v3-update https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1821-clarisworks-5-0-wit...