this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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This is like boomers who fantasize about millenials breaking down in tears when confronted with a rotary phone or vinyl record or gramophone. The whole premise is ridiculous and always revolves around an item so iconic its use is immediately obvious to anyone who's ever, like, seen a movie.
Now I guess old cranky farts being old cranky farts shouldn't matter, if it wasn't for the fact that their unfounded opinions on Gen Z's supposed ignorance are already breaking UX patterns everywhere. The save icon is going away, and now it's a guessing game as to which button has replaced it. Is it the little cloud? The down arrow, or the up arrow? Is there even an icon? Who knows!
I mean... my students fresh outta high school in college don't understand filetypes, folders, or that you can't break a website by exploring it. Lots of them say things like "but, I can't open a doc file. I don't have Word." Or email me a "google doc file" as a submission.
Shit's handed to them on mobile in big-buttoned friendly webapps.
Since when? Everybody knows that icon means "save", even if they don't know the history behind it. You don't need to know what a floppy is in order to understand that this symbol means "save".
Idk if it's that extreme or needs such a vitriolic reaction, but obsolescence is always lurking around the corner.
I personally think that there will never not be a demand for physical storage in a tiny thumb sized package, but I'm not so arrogant as to assume it's the End Of Storage. Hell, I bet disks seemed pretty great and advanced at the time too.
So, I know it's an old take to laugh at people that don't know x that older people took for granted. The idea here was rather to give it a more respectful spin. Nobody's ridiculed here. It's supposed to give it this point of view of the older guy that doesn't make fun of the younger ones but just reminds them that they'll be in the same shoes eventually, with stuff that they took for granted fading into obscurity. You know, taking a more humble stance, without being condescending.
On another note, the save icon going away might have something to do with programs just writing everything to storage anytime ASAP so the whole idea of writing to disk just disappears. Don't know if I like that workflow though, I'm too used to saving my work.
I'll just have to make software that shows a USB symbol for the save icon.
And you have to click on it in the right spot or it doesn't work.
Or there's a 70% chance you have to click it three times.
The browser version of Office 365 frustrates me the most with this, their autosave works well but it is impossible to "save as" anything. They just allow to download an xlsx copy, and I have to open that in LibreOffice to convert to CSV or whatever is relevant. And of course no save icon to download the xlsx because someone decided a skeumorphic floppy disk is too incongruent with the cloud.
I'm sorry if I came off as a bitter asshole (I guess I kinda am), it's just that this common sentiment feels patronizing because "outdated" ≠ "obscure". Like, pagers I would say are actually obscure because they were more of a gimmick than a truly mass-market product, but floppies and CDs were in such wide circulation for such a long time that I'd expect a teenager to recognize one at a glance even if they have never personally used that technology.
Huh, I thought pagers were still a thing in medicine/hospitals.
So are fax and floppies for really old processes and equipment, but pagers are not visually/culturally iconic and most people never had one so most people born after 2000 wouldn't recognize them at a glance unless they worked in a specific field that uses severely outdated tech. Hell, there are probably still industrial machines in production somewhere that take punch cards.