The Save Icon

John Gruber, in March 2010:

Icon for the Save button is still a floppy disk, despite the fact that Apple hasn’t sold a machine with a floppy drive for a decade.

David Friedman, last week:

Not only don’t people use floppy disks anymore, but the options for saving are even more varied now than simple disk format. You might save to your own computer, or a drive on a server somewhere off in the cloud. You might even be using a program that autosaves in certain intervals without you needing to think about it.

Marco Arment, yesterday:

With the sophistication we have in modern hardware and software, there’s no reason anyone should ever lose any work to crashes or power outages because they forgot to hit Save for a while.

Here’s the case in favour of a save button: I do some web publishing for an organization at my university. We provide “normal” students with the ability to update club sites on their own. In this scenario, I have encountered countless examples where people inadvertently saved & published content to their website. In Web publishing, versioning is a big deal. In fact, often the publishing process jumps between many people, and if you’d have to navigate automated versions of every text on a website, mayhem would ensue. There is value in manual saving, or versioning.