UI-suggestions

[Sunnanvind Fenderson <sunnanvind fenderson com>]

Hi, I just subscribed. I guess I should lurk a while, but I wanted to
pop these things of my thought-stack...

Why is the icon for "save" an image of a floppy drive? Okay, I know
the historical reasons (it made sense on my parents' 386 with win
3.11), but why keep it these days?

I realized it when I switched to Emacs 21 from Emacs 20 (because it
has a toolbar). I went like "hmm, how do I save using the
toolbar... huh? what does the 'floppy-icon' do?".

Most of the people on this planet has never used windows.

Well, some people will just answer me "think of something better,
then!" It's hard. Maybe a pen, for write? (The Nautilus I used last
had a cirled-over pen emblem for "no-write-access") Or maybe an image
of a safe, or some kind of box?

Maybe just by pointing out the weirdness in using an image of a floppy
disk I can get the creative gears spinning in peoples heads.

--

The other thing I wanted to suggest/ask might have been fixed in Gnome
2. If so, please forgive me. I have gnome-panel version 1.4.0.6 .

The issue is hitting the edge of the screen with my pointer. To use
the menubar, I have to tap/click at just the right distance from the
top of the screen (a range of a few pixels). Why not allow the user
(luser, in my case... I've used GUIs for ten years but I still haven't
learned to like WIMP-guis. The Ion wm is nice, though.) to click at
the very top row of pixels? It's so much easier to hit.

Same goes for the task-list applet at the bottom.

Thanks for listening,
Sunnanvind.