[OSX-Users] Re: Mystery Icon

[Chris Andrews]

On 28 Mar 2011, at 12:55, Philip Boulain <prb at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

> 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.

We'll need to replace it soon - since most people haven't seen a floppy for about six years now, and there'll be a generation coming up who've never encountered them.

But that's for a HCI mind to dream up, rather than me

Chris