Saving us from ourselves
It doesn’t go unremarked that, 10-years after the introduction of the floppy-less iMac, there are still a few applications using the apparently anachronistic icon of the 3½-inch diskette to represent the concept of saving a file.
I have no objections to it, myself. It’s a lovely little hieroglyph that reminds me how awesome computers seemed to me in the 90s. They were the go-to MacGuffins of the modern computer-era in movies like Hackers and The Net.
These days memory cards are the size of fingernails and disks can look like anything from tiki statues to laptop humping dogs. So what do we get as the current representation of data storage? A featureless rectangular slab?
In OS X, Apple choses to represent unmounted .dmg disk images as metallic cases of internal hard-disks, a circular indent showing the location of the platters (something that’s familiar to most computer people, but probably abstract for Mac users). Oddly, when mounted, they then come to resemble an external drive of some kind – a white flat rectangular casing. Apple’s iconography for online storage (iDisk) is an external drive casing with a abstract cloud symbol on it – possibly enshrining it as a future anachronism.
So the modern floppy-less save icons tend to look like arrows pointing at slabs, or at cylinders, or pointing into file folders (because some metaphors transcend). Sometimes it’s a sharpened pencil writing directly on to the surface of a magnetic disk.
Of course there are some that regard the question of representing a save icon as moot. The concept of “save” is apparently tied to a doomed file-centric paradigm, and that files will be replaced by a continually recorded timestream of changes – the file-as-document will become closer to a spool. The play and record buttons are always down. (The specific user action will be closer to concept of “export” where capturing the state of a “file” at a specific time is still required.)
This concept of auto-saving has been a familiar one in videogames in the last few years, but that hasn’t removed the need for iconographic communication. The games still need to communicate when information is being saved to warn the user not to switch the power off or remove devices and risk leaving the data in a corrupted state. There are no secondary indicators – no whirring noises, no flashing indicator LEDs, no iPod display requesting not to be unplugged. On PS2 games they would frequently use an iconographic representation of the removable memory cards. But how do you visually communicate the internal storage of the Wii?
One of the games I’m currently playing uses a spinning DVD (a read-only medium in videogame-land) to represent, not when the DVD is being read (duh), but when data is being written to internal memory. I assume there was nothing else suitable in their development kit.
So instead of an icon a user selects to instruct the computer to save, we’re now in need of a universal visual representation an instruction from the computer. “Attention human: I’m saving your work. Don’t do anything that might prevent me from doing this.” (Something that potentially becomes much trickier when you think about devices with no persistent storage saving directly to the cloud.)
And, really, what communicates this better than an angry cartoon mole?
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