On the subject of eliminating the save function altogether, in favor of a perpetual history or automated cloud saves - not very much a fan. My Blender projects can get huge as it is, and I find the idea of iterative saves too useful; it’s just so much easier to go back to “project_26.blend” when I decide to “undo” a significant amount of work, than to go on an undo-spree inside the project itself, or hunt and peck through a context-less history list of vague command and operator names hoping I end up in the right spot. I sometimes deliberately “fork” a project when I’m feeling experimental, for this exact reason. Plus, when the project is finally, actually finished it’s good to be able to delete all those iterative saves; a permanent history list all the way back to the default cube has to add a whole lot of file-size and memory overhead to a project file.
The Floppy has landed!
I see you have also changed import and export so that they now use vertical arrows indicating direction.
I would suggest reserving those particular icons with the “up” and “down” arrows for upload and download, even if not strictly needed yet.
Your old import and export versions, with diagonal arrows were fine although a bit plain. They seemed to be missing a box (or something similar) to unambiguously indicate the front/to direction. And I would personally swap the horizontal direction of the export arrow to match left-to-right reading direction (so import going top-left to bottom right going into something, while export comes out of something from bottom left to top-right)
The save command is not for saving to floppies, and so the floppy icon is incorrect. I will rather just remove the icon for save altogether.
Nor do we save contents to actual clipboards. Or use an old-fashioned movie camera. We don’t use real paperclips, pieces of chain, magnifying glasses, wrenches, or thumbtacks either. Nor locks, lightbulbs, pencils, combs, or gears. And our hearts are anatomically incorrect.
We use all of these things because they communicate ideas in a language that is common among most of us. We look at an eyeball and can easily guess it is to do with visibility, not eyeballs. And for the same reason, we should us a “floppy disk” save icon because that is what most of us expect to be there in place of the idea of “saving a file.”
Of course, we do not write on floppy disks. But:
- while rendering, we do not record the image on the film (W10 and W11 icons);
- armature bones are not bones per se (W19 and X19 icons);
- the Modifier has nothing to do with the wrench (M1, AA17 icons);
- assignment of the Fake User data block does not consist in putting this data in the safe or attaching it to something with adhesive tape (AA25, AA26);
- the file is not a piece of paper with a bent corner …
And so on …
Lots of icons are ambiguous and everything is fine. They are widely accepted. The Floppy is not a worse or more stupid than all of the above symbols.
You may find it outdated. Oldfashioned maybe, but fussiness due to the use of the floppy icon, is unjustified, against the acceptance of other ambiguous and imprecise / incorrect pictograms. Re-inventing the wheel only for the sake of obscure modernity and unjustified pretensions about the correctness of the widely accepted symbol is… not wise.
The “File” menu should contain a pinch of icons for the most frequently used commands. To be honest, it doesn’t matter what shape they will be - stars, cubes, pokemons… Semantical corectness has nothing to do with this, while recognizabiliy does. These are necessary landmarks, which help you navigate the menu. Save is one of the most important functions and must be marked with an icon. So - removing this very pictogram is not wise either.
Again: There is no such thing as an ‘incorrect’ icon - the symbol just has to get the intended meaning across, and it does that by being agreed upon by its users. The link between symbol and meaning is arbitrary and conventional. Basic sign theory. Please, please, please read up on semiotics. And then ask yourself: is it a good idea to remove one of the most universally understood icons from blender?
This can’t be serious.
Unbelievable.
Your stubbornness on this topic is not logical or constructive. It seems you’re more interested in getting your own way and using Blender as a platform to enforce your own bias than you are in creating a clear and understandable experience for your users.
What a shame that an open source developer is more interested in fighting his users than listening to them.
We all use different hardware and you will never know on what medium people saves their files, it could be on hdd, ssd, sd card, usb memory, drop box or even a floppy…
Icons is never that specific or should be, its about communicating a behaviour in the most common/ obvious way.
Exactly! More than a little troubling that someone with UI decision making power doesn’t even understand the very basic concepts of it! Yikes! 
The save command is not for saving to floppies, and so the floppy icon is incorrect. I will rather just remove the icon for save altogether.
Serious question: Are you twelve? Do you own Blender or something? There have been a litany of changes that many users have had real trouble adjusting too, but they did. Now they’re given something the majority of them want, and you are bitterly complaining about it.
If you don’t want to give people that impression, let it go.
We do have many areas where we have icons where they are not needed at all. We seem to drop one in because we have that one icon then keep adding new ones until the original menu/area has an icon for every single entry. In some places it just adds noise without adding anything else. For example the “person” and “computer circuit” icons, shown in the left-side menu of the user Preferences, should be removed.
However, at the very minimum it is really nice to have icons for New, Open, and Save on the “File” menu. If you have ever tried to use a Japanese program (assuming you know no Japanese), having those few icons can really go a long way to actually learning to use a program in a foreign language. I’d also add Copy, Paste, Undo, and Redo as other necessary icons for minimum functionality.
Exactly, other icons are superfluous.
If you wanted to cut down on icons, play the game in reverse and try to deduce meaning from the icons. Those that give you most trouble are probably the least conventionalized ones, which are thus pretty much useless, nothing more than ornaments. Of course context and local contrast play into this, but it is a good exercise to take the icons out of their context.
So how do those programs avoid writing gigabytes of data to your drive for every minute you use it?
In my opinion, the whole worry about remembering to save is less critical in Blender due to how stable the application can be, it’s not plagued with crash issues like a number of the big commercial solutions.
In any sense, I would be curious to see an example of a system based on writing to a series of .diff files much like how developers use github. I would think at the least, the revision list will need a hard limit in terms of the amount of disk space allocated to it.
As for the complaints, I guess part of it could be a case of “Oh dear FOSS is trying to innovate again, that should only be done by commercial vendors, FOSS should only copy and not try to lead”.
Sorry @william but this is, I have to say, silly. By your logic no save icon could exist, they all would be incorrect, since there’s no way to depict what a file is and how it is written.
You’re a smart guy (your UI proposals prove it) so you’ll surely understand you can’t keep this as a strong argument against the floppy icon.
There are many good explanations here. Plus a poll. Please consider them.
If you want to go on on your track, should we take note that blender has a new benevolent dictator? 
Seriously. What is up really William ? Some deep childhood memory of an incident involving a floppy disk ?
Someone mentioned SSD drives, since they are starting to replace the spinning platters in many cases, it could be the thing to look at if an upgraded standard was really desired.
I also noticed William mentioning cloud computing. I really would reconsider letting that influence development decisions as the majority of people are not going to pay monthly for the privilege of using a computer.
As for what I touched on earlier, I think if such an automated versioning system is done (ie. getting an earlier state being as simple as selecting the file in the browser and picking a revision). This experimental save system will need to coexist with traditional saving for a while while bugs are being worked out. The files using the new system could even have a slightly changed format such a .blendx or something to avoid confusion.
In addition, what about time-based revisioning rather than operator-based, or what about bookmarking a revision that makes it stay until the user doesn’t want it anymore?
Anyway, I’m not going to spend hours debating the save icon and the concept itself. Christmas Eve is tomorrow and Christmas is Tuesday. Those who want to spend that time bashing William might as well be the equivalent of that guy that says “Bah humbug” 
To conclude, what William is proposing regarding Blender’s save system is only a proposal and no changes have been done as a result. Though it must be really tiring for the devs. to read these threads and hear the constant kneejerk “Blender is doomed, it’s hopeless, abandon ship” reactions even if the proposed change is nothing more than some one-liner they tossed out for brainstorming.
If one intents to extinguish the save functionality, killing its icon should be the last resource…
First turn Blender into a non destructive workflow application like Lightroom or Final Cut and then come back to the war against floppy icon.
I feel like this would make for a good save icon