6 ms·

Exactly, I suspect there is nothing we can replace it with. A TV with rabbit ears will always be a TV - perhaps a hundred years from now?

jreeve 14y ago
This reminds me very much of how the genesis of ideographic writing (such as Chinese characters) was related to me. I'm not at all certain that it is correct, but gist of it was that these forms of writing start with illustrations but gradually become encoded over time.
- 1337p337 14y ago
  Not only that, but the author also seems annoyed by older terminology taking new meanings, as with "radio buttons", "bookmarks", and "folders". The irony here is that he has no problem calling the device he uses a "computer", despite the older definition no longer holding true, or especially referring to "files", which is certainly not a term used in the old sense. Dijkstra's "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science" rails against analogies (the source of these terms) at length, but I'm not certain that there's much validity to the argument when the new meaning of the term eclipses the old one.
- __alexs 14y ago
  I quite like the idea of doing an app where all the icons are Chinese ideographs with native language tooltips and descriptions. It would be a little like living in the Firefly universe but with more iPhones.
  - goblin89 14y ago
    It won't make much sense to do in one app. Users (except for Firefly fans and/or Chinese learners) will hate it, because the complex design of hanzi is optimized for having thousands of these characters to distinguish between. Now, if we had all the icons in all apps replaced consistently with Chinese simplified characters—that would be fun. I don't think it would be such a disaster (except to icon design business profits), after we rediscover how functions map to pictures again we'll continue to utilize UIs as usual. Admittedly a bit slower because of more complex hanzi shape, but without having to deal with badly designed or inconsistently used icons[0]. And also we'll be sure that when a new concept appears we will have an icon for that. If not—well, we'll start combining hanzi. [0] An example of one such goof: http://plus.google.com/photos/108564542236590882918/albums/posts/5738172816383199778 http://plus.google.com/photos/108564542236590882918/albums/p...
flomo 14y ago
And it will always have rounded corners, long after everyone forgets what a TV tube looked like.
drostie 14y ago
This "nothing we can replace it with" sounded wrong to me, so I spent a moment trying to quickly draw on my tablet some possible alternate metaphors for many of the things used in this article, and I came up with these: http://drostie.org/icons.png http://drostie.org/icons.png (Disclaimer: my ability to draw is very limited so this looks unintentionally minimalist, because my "boxes" are just squares.) You could have some convention which says, say, "the present file is a sort of ball or rounded object, the filesystem is a box where we can put our balls, the clipboard is some sort of stack of stuff," and so forth. Phones could look more like mobiles do now, if you put them in a bit of perspective and gave them a keypad. Rather than using the page for a generic document, we have the ball for that purpose, so we use the page instead to indicate printing, since you're converting the ball into a piece of paper. I think wrenches, magnifying glasses, and binoculars can stay as iconic things -- but since people now use magnifying glasses for "zoom" we should perhaps stabilize on binoculars for "search"/"find". (And come on, I'm not Sherlock Holmes. I'm not trying to find a clue, I'm trying to find last night's homework.) Email is much trickier; if we don't keep using envelopes, I don't know how we would iconify that.
- falcojr 14y ago
  I like the look of those, but I did laugh when I saw the cell phone with an antenna on the top.
  - drostie 14y ago
    I actually spent fifteen minutes or so going back and forth on that. My old cell phone had one, perhaps for style, yet my new phone doesn't. And I was thinking a lot about that bizarre V-shaped TV antenna, too. ^_^
- vacri 14y ago
  I like your general icons, but your phone is already obsolete. I'm also not sure why the last two represent real world devices rather than abstract concepts, given that your other icons are pretty intuitive.
  - 14y ago

jreeve 14y ago

This reminds me very much of how the genesis of ideographic writing (such as Chinese characters) was related to me. I'm not at all certain that it is correct, but gist of it was that these forms of writing start with illustrations but gradually become encoded over time.

1337p337 14y ago
Not only that, but the author also seems annoyed by older terminology taking new meanings, as with "radio buttons", "bookmarks", and "folders". The irony here is that he has no problem calling the device he uses a "computer", despite the older definition no longer holding true, or especially referring to "files", which is certainly not a term used in the old sense. Dijkstra's "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science" rails against analogies (the source of these terms) at length, but I'm not certain that there's much validity to the argument when the new meaning of the term eclipses the old one.
__alexs 14y ago
I quite like the idea of doing an app where all the icons are Chinese ideographs with native language tooltips and descriptions. It would be a little like living in the Firefly universe but with more iPhones.
- goblin89 14y ago
  It won't make much sense to do in one app. Users (except for Firefly fans and/or Chinese learners) will hate it, because the complex design of hanzi is optimized for having thousands of these characters to distinguish between. Now, if we had all the icons in all apps replaced consistently with Chinese simplified characters—that would be fun. I don't think it would be such a disaster (except to icon design business profits), after we rediscover how functions map to pictures again we'll continue to utilize UIs as usual. Admittedly a bit slower because of more complex hanzi shape, but without having to deal with badly designed or inconsistently used icons[0]. And also we'll be sure that when a new concept appears we will have an icon for that. If not—well, we'll start combining hanzi. [0] An example of one such goof: http://plus.google.com/photos/108564542236590882918/albums/posts/5738172816383199778 http://plus.google.com/photos/108564542236590882918/albums/p...

flomo 14y ago

And it will always have rounded corners, long after everyone forgets what a TV tube looked like.

drostie 14y ago

This "nothing we can replace it with" sounded wrong to me, so I spent a moment trying to quickly draw on my tablet some possible alternate metaphors for many of the things used in this article, and I came up with these: http://drostie.org/icons.png http://drostie.org/icons.png (Disclaimer: my ability to draw is very limited so this looks unintentionally minimalist, because my "boxes" are just squares.) You could have some convention which says, say, "the present file is a sort of ball or rounded object, the filesystem is a box where we can put our balls, the clipboard is some sort of stack of stuff," and so forth. Phones could look more like mobiles do now, if you put them in a bit of perspective and gave them a keypad. Rather than using the page for a generic document, we have the ball for that purpose, so we use the page instead to indicate printing, since you're converting the ball into a piece of paper. I think wrenches, magnifying glasses, and binoculars can stay as iconic things -- but since people now use magnifying glasses for "zoom" we should perhaps stabilize on binoculars for "search"/"find". (And come on, I'm not Sherlock Holmes. I'm not trying to find a clue, I'm trying to find last night's homework.) Email is much trickier; if we don't keep using envelopes, I don't know how we would iconify that.

falcojr 14y ago
I like the look of those, but I did laugh when I saw the cell phone with an antenna on the top.
- drostie 14y ago
  I actually spent fifteen minutes or so going back and forth on that. My old cell phone had one, perhaps for style, yet my new phone doesn't. And I was thinking a lot about that bizarre V-shaped TV antenna, too. ^_^
vacri 14y ago
I like your general icons, but your phone is already obsolete. I'm also not sure why the last two represent real world devices rather than abstract concepts, given that your other icons are pretty intuitive.
- 14y ago