Comment by overfeed
7 days ago
> A lot of those real world objects no longer exists
Yep. What would the modern equivalent of the save icon - a cloud or an generic IC representing the soldered-on SDD? Hard drives, floppies, or any other user-controlled storage devices are now out of fashion.
I find it comical that macOS displays an HDD icon for internal storage. It's even using the "old", skeuomorphic art style, from before the flat design.
(It also displays a CRT with a Windows 95 BSOD for Samba network shares, but that's 100% on purpose.)
OTOH Apple's own apps haven't had a "save" button for a really long time now. Everything autosaves (and syncs to iCloud) automatically - use Undo if you need to. More complex apps, like Numbers, also automatically maintain a version history.
I've seen a few instances of an arrow pointing down into a box/tray. I'm not sure how I feel about it. It seems appropriate, but the only caveat is that a lot of applications already represent 'download' with a similar icon. I imagine some product designers would be unhappy with a download-looking icon representing saving to a location in "the cloud".
USB flash drives are still quite universally used and a direct replacement for the floppy's functionality. I've seen a USB stick shaped icon used as a metaphor for saving in some places. But I agree with the sibling post that the text "save" probably has more staying power.
Personally I'd just make it a button that says "Save", but I doubt that's going to be popular.
And while we're making the button say Save, perhaps we could put other buttons around it that just say what they do. We could even group those buttons into common types of activities, and then hide them in some sort of flyout dialog until you want to actually use them. We could group all File activities, all activities relating to the View, all activities relating to getting Help. This idea might revolutionize computing!
Especially not in non-English countries.
Icons make localisation much easier. In fact flat web design has evolved a fairly standard set of icons for basic operations. Most people know what a burger menu and x in the top corner of a window do. Same for copy, share, and so on.
The problem with Liquid Glass is that it's making the background style more important than the foreground content. No one cares if buttons ripple if they can't see what they do, because icons themselves are less clear and harder to read.
So I don't know what the point of this is.
Unifying the look with Apple's least successful, least popular, most niche product seems like a bizarre decision. I'm guessing the plan is to start adding VisionPro features in other products, but without 3D displays the difference between 3D and 2D metaphors is too huge to bridge.
I really liked Aqua. It was attractive and it was very usable.
This is... I don't know. It seems like style over substance for the sake of it, with significant damage to both.
"Save" is 4 characters in English, but it's over twice as long in German (9 Characters), and even longer in French (11). The variable length means the UX for word-based buttons would need to be designed for the longest case, which is why we mainly see them in title bars for navigation, or in very sparse UI.