[OSX-Users] Re: Mystery Icon

[Philip Boulain]

On 28/03/2011 12:51, Les A Carr wrote:
> Sigh. Yes, I get it cos I'm old enough to remember when 5 1/4" floppy 
> disks were an innovation. So a 3.5" disk still looks shiny and modern 
> to me - BUT WHY ARE WE STILL USING THEM as an image of persistent 
> cloud storage in Google Docs. Isn't it just time that we moved on 
> before we embarrass ourselves in front of the new students?

Because nobody's come up with a better metaphor that sticks yet. A 
picture of a hard drive is no good because it's just a block (no good 
showing platters---we've moving into SSD) and most users won't actually 
see one, whereas floppies were user-visible in day-to-day operation for 
years.

A picture of a cloud would make me think "weather forecast", and is 
still inappropriate for wanting to save data to the local filesystem.

-- 
| Philip Boulain   PhD student |  |\_|\ | Moore's Law doesn't apply to |
| IAM, ECS, Uni of Southampton | >o.o < | batteries.                   |
| http://zepler.net/~lionsphil |  `---' |         -- Douglas Crockford |