www.fooberry.com

When was the last time you used one of these . Not the icon, but the actual physical media? I think it’s been at least three years since I owned a PC that could actually read them and a couple years before that since I’ve actually read something off of one.

Now everyone knows the Angry Monkey story right? To paraphrase it in a sentance:

Whenever you hear “…because we’ve always done it that way,” first shut off the alarm in your head and secondly, ask for another reason. 

It might be that the reason is valid, but it might be that no one knows.

Which brings me to the de facto save icon . I would be willing to bet the kids graduating college today have never in their years at university, or probably life, ever used a floppy disk, but every one of them knows it means to save their documents by clicking on it. Now, they know what one is, and might have seen a couple in their parents’ desk drawer, but as visual correlation to its function, it falls well short. 

Following the icons down the toolbar, the bold icon looks bold, the italics icon looks like it is read to fall over, but the save icon looks like a box, within a box.

But that’s always been the save icon

Yes it has, but why? Because I use to actually put something that looked like that into my computer, click that button, and then take my stuff floppy disk out and walk away. Surely since we don’t save to floppies anymore there has to be a better icon. Some progressive company like Google surely thought this up already and I’m sure they have a cooler save icon on Google Docs. Nope. They still use . That’s actually a different icon, even through they look identical.

So why is the blue floppy disk the de facto save icon? What would a better icon be? Will people in 10 years still be putting floppy disks on their Minority Report UI’s? How could you even change something that is already so installed into nearly every user’s brain of every software community.

There is probably no other visual clue that is so widely understood. Not even the X to close a window is shared across platforms as much as the save icon. So maybe that is the reason why it has never changed and Tom Hanks is going to punch his floppy disk floating in mid air. The cost of breaking those now decades of education is too expensive.

We’re all going to be angry monkeys because angry is the new content. We stop you from climbing the latter, not because we know the outcome, because if you climb it, we all have to climb it in order for it to work.

This past weekend my girlfriend asked what in the world the name of my blog meant.  She said she didn’t understand the “Sweetness Without Context” sub title. After thinking about it for a minute I gave her an answer slightly less nerdy than this:

foo·ber·ry /foo - ber - ree/ jargon

1. A metasyntactic variable fruit used commonly* in computer science to represent a source of all natural, non-high fructose corn syrup, sugary sweetness.
2. A derivation of a street near where I live, Hackberry Dr.
3. A cool, at least to me, sounding blog name

* The term “commonly” is used for small definitions of the word common, meaning less than or equal to only one person.

None of that was much help, except maybe the last one. She still didn’t understand what I meant by “foo”. I decided to look up the etymology of “foo”, which was no help and even “foobar” had very little.

In technology, the word was probably originally propagated through system manuals by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1960s and early 1970s.

Even “FUBAR”, to which “foobar” is not suppose to be related, provided little certainy; however, one fact did stand out.

FUBAR may have been influenced by the German word furchtbar, meaning terrible. It is pronounced with a soft cht, and probably made the transition during World War II.

Maybe there is some lineage there after all. Knowing what is commonly implemented for “foo”, “terrible” is probably a good substitute. I wonder if the “Hello World” on the Enginma was written using furchtbar.

None of this has helped me explain “fooberry” to a non-techie. So basically, to me, “fooberry” is a term for something that sweetens whatever it is that you do.

That was actually much easier than explaining my last blog name: Ontological Reciprocity. That would take much longer, and I’m not sure I even totally understand it correctly, but it sure sounds cool.

Everyone uses, or at least knows about the member dropdown in Visual Studio

ReSharper will give you that same list of members in the current file via Alt + \ and let you search on it.

Again, don’t forget how powerful the ReSharper search boxes are.