I tried to use a fishbowl full of car keys but it was hard to make it read so I just use the biohazard symbol now.
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Yes. Just show me the link. Then I can trim off any tracking tokens. I donât know how unusual I am but I like to compose my own messages and paste my own links. I simply do not believe my interests and those of the social media companies are aligned. In short I donât use share buttons for anything except generating the odd email with attachment.
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I think its because there lingers an awareness of or concern about propriety among share operators that the web is not yet securely beyond a re-CompuServization into graphically dynamic AOL-esque walled gardens.
My first thought was âspermsâ. Chasing each othersâ tails.
Second thought: It looks too much like the Homegroup icon (as if anyone uses homegroup when workgroups are already setup and running by default)
Well, the thing is, when you click a âshareâ button, that button usually has a drop-down or similar with options to choose which vehicle to share it on⌠Which is where one universal button would come in handy⌠Which is the pointâŚ
Iâve never even tried one of these buttons. Two of the programmable buttons on my mouse are Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V.
Bah, kids these days. Next youâll be telling me that I could âuse RSSâ instead of signing up for a half dozen accounts to âfollowâ things, and maybe even use crazy protocols like SMTP and XMPP that work between services.
Son, if the internet had been intended as a peer-to-peer connection among multiple architecturally equal systems, ARPA would have designed it thatâŚeh, never mindâŚ
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Yeah. Adblock Plus cleans out all those grodi tracker-laden share links. The only point of putting them there is either for that set of people who google âaltavista.comâ in order to go to altavista and do a search for their gmail login page, or to increase ad revenue by having another place to click-thru.
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Non-surprisingly the only ones that really look like âshareâ buttons are the Apple versions.
Google was kind of good up until 2011 even though two arrows make zero sense, but later decided to make something that looks even worse without arrows. Do you want to divide your file into two?
Microsoftâs looks like youâre just going to get caught in a loop of some kind in Windows 8 or similar to a refresh button:
I wonât even mention the Windows Phone 7 one because itâs so fucking ridiculous. Whomever designed that should probably kill themselves.
The Open Share Icon looks like youâre going to grab something, not share it outwards in any way. Enable âcovetâ!
Apple seems to be the only one that gets it. Of all of them, the universal âshareâ icon should be the Apple versions, preferably the Mavericks one.
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FWIW, at my jobâs intranet we use the Android symbol
right. in IOS7, I use the sharing icon for âadd to reading listâ far more often than I use it for âpost to facebookâ, or whatever. On the other hand, technically I am sharing the data with the icloud service, rather than just talking with the macs on my own network. Thinking of it as social sharing may inspire me to ditch icloud and⌠No, itâs far too convenient.
When I first saw the headline, I was thinking that this was going to be a post deploring atomicity in sharing icons. I see a post, and I should be able to mail it to all my friends, submit it slashdotâs binspam/firehose, post it to twitter, pin it to pinterest, and put it up on my facebook wall, all with a single clickâŚ
Iâm not conviced.
The IOS7 Download and Upload/Share icons could also be save to device and open from device, and would make far more sense than the continued use of the floppy disk and folder symbols.
The pre IOS7 version makes me think of email, which is where I think it came from in the first place. It makes some sense now (how we shared things before social media) but It has the same long term issues as the floppy disk save icon.
I do agree with you that the pre IOS7 one is the best for now but we need something better long term, and I canât think of anything that would universally suggest sharing.
Edit: I just asked a friend what they thought and they suggested a big red stop sign with NSA on it.
I dunno, I think an arrow pointing outwards from a box is the best weâre gonna get. The box expresses your computer/display and the arrow represents sending something outwards. Anything else is intuitive unless itâs to have cluttered text instead of a graphical button.
A sperm! Thatâs the perfect âsharingâ icon!
Eh. Sometimes ludditism is less than helpful.
I take a picture on my phone. I want to send it to my mother. Are you saying I should
- Click some button to upload the photo to a website (and not to use an icon for the action because itâs confusing)
- Go to the web page, copy the link using the crappy highlight-copy on my phoneâs screen
- Open email, paste the link into it
- Have my mother open the email and open the link in her web browser
or
- Press the button that sends the photo to my mother as an attachment (email, mms, whatever)
âShareâ is a common general action that encompasses many specific variations of sharing, whether Iâm looking at photos on my phone, on my browser looking at a web page, or sharing my wifi from my hotspot. As a user, the first thing I want to do is to âshare.â The context-specific choice of actions comes later. And much of the time sharing a link is not what I want to do.
Well when weâre talking on-device content, instead of a link what we need is a path pointing to where itâs locally stored - something you could then paste into an âattachâ line on an email.
My issue is with this mentality that software needs to âknow aboutâ each other in order to work, and that files are being treated like they only exist within the apps that âownâ them.
Just show me where the content is - local or hosted - and let me do with it as I choose.
Nothing wrong with wanting transparent file paths for a multitude of uses, but what youâre asking for is ridiculously cumbersome for the âsend the picture Iâm looking at in my phone to my motherâs emailâ example discussed.
âOk phone, show me the file path for this. Now to fidget with the teeny tiny text selection tool⌠dragging my finger⌠almost there⌠there we go. Now copy. Now tap the home screen button. Email app. New message. Type momâs email. Type subject. Select text box. Paste. Send.â
All that, and it wonât even work because mom wonât be able to remotely access your phoneâs filesystem, will she?
Edit. Nevermind the last part, just understood your âattach lineâ suggestion. The rest stands.
For the cis-gender patriarchy, that makes sense.
three sperms, one egg.
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Just use a muted megaphone. Perfectly signifies âshout it out to the worldâ and ânobodyâs gonna listen thoâ
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