I’m a big fan of using keystrokes – as opposed to mouse clicks – even in programs that are set up for GUI use. Just faster and more intelligent.

It makes me nuts when I see someone, for example, typing in a text program (Word, HomeSite, whatever) and then taking their hand off the keyboard, reaching for the mouse, and running the cursor up to the application menu and clicking the “Save” icon.

What’s the matter with Cntr-S? (Or Command-S on Macs)

I actually caught myself doing this the other day (bad!), and it made we think about that Save icon.

Does this icon – which appears (in some form) in most applications, regardless of OS – even make sense today? It’s a floppy disk. For users of iMacs, for example, this will be really weird: There is no floppy disk. And Dell is starting to drop them as a standard feature on their desktops; most/many notebooks have dropped them to some degree. For example, my three-year-old ThinkPad has a floppy drive, but it’s an external drive (and I virtually never use it).

My guess is that we are stuck with this icon for some time, as it means Save – most users get that.

But it’s kind of weird….in not too many years, newbies will be able to find this icon to save things, but they probably won’t know why the icon looks like that.

It will be another one of those oddball icons that you recognize because you’ve been – explicitly or by discovering it – exposed to it as such.