With MS, and other companies too I suppose, their icon for “save” is a floppy disk.

I think I do not have any Apple applications that show icons in the Menu Bar. And so I wonder…

As Apple has not used floppies for several years, what icon, if any, are developers to now use for a “save”?

My guess would be that since Apple doesn't use Save icons in its own applications, it frowns on any third-party use of same as violations of the "consistent look and feel" doctrine of Macintosh application design.

I found no reference to Save icons in the otherwise-illuminating document Apple Human Interface Guidelines: Icons.

dkmarsh,

Ah, now the young grasshopper understands.

My thanks-

And now you must polish counterclockwise ....

Hi, Harv

From the past . . . the "Save Document" icon for the AppleWorks Button Bar looks like this:

AppleWorks Save Icon

Master Po: Close your eyes. What do you hear?
Young Caine: I hear the water, I hear the birds.
Po: Do you hear your own heartbeat?
Caine: No.
Po: Do you hear the grasshopper which is at your feet?
Caine: Old man, how is it that you hear these things?
Po: Young man, how is it that you do not?

Exactly.

Office for Mac 2004
Word and Excel both use the floppy icon for Save.

As does Office 2008.

And, from the previews of Office 2010, MS continues with their old ways, refusing to adhere to Apple's Human Interface Guidelines.

Floppy is a good icon because it's so readily recognized, even to those that have never seen a real live floppy in person, that it can be in fairly low resolution with only a little icon and still be immediately understood.

Other icons I've seen involve thick downward pointing arrows, usually of the green variety. Apple's firmware updaters are a good example. They usually have a chip below them. But for file saves I've seen a hard drive below the arrow on several occasions. Rarely you also see a globe above the arrow if it's an internet download.

But hard drives are not quite as recognizable, especially to the lay man, and don't fair well at low resolution/size.

The eye seems to accept progression from top to bottom better than left to right, and I think that's why this arrow method is more common than say an arrow pointing to a floppy to its right.

Apple's installer uses a grey arrow to a hard drive. In terminal:


You can see when you get down to the 32x32 icon the hard drive turns into a somewhat unidentifiable silver block. Now imagine that with a hole in the middle, a shutter, and a label. Much easier to identify.

Better than an image of a bank, these days!

Hmm, seems a tad roundabout. Why not


...or at least


so the Preview window is in front?

I didn't know the 'open' command had the "-a" paramter, thx

[off topic]
Hmm, I just notice that your two examples don't show under Windows (XP). The Code boxes are there, but they’re empty. Does anyone else see this?
[/off topic]