There’s a pretty active post over on branch.com about redesigning the save symbol, following the argument that the floppy disk icon is far too obsolete to be relevant any more. This isn’t new, this conversation has bubbled up from time to time. I think though maybe the question needs to change: Do we need a save icon any more?

I was trying to think of the last time I clicked on a save icon, or hit ctrl-S to manually cause a save to happen. Usually anything I’m working on is auto-saved now, from email drafts to coding with Sublime Text 2. The manual save operation has become a dinosaur action.

Inside that discussion post on branch.com PJ Onori suggests that “saving will be more about explicitly calling out a specific point in time.” I can see a lot of value in that. Instead of saving whatever it is we’re working on, we’ll snapshot it. It’d be as if we had a type of revision control system for everything we create on our laptops - an email that I’m writing, or a blog post, doesn’t need to be tossed into a repo on github as I work on it, and I no longer need to worry about manually saving progress, but capturing its evolving state on a timeline could be of great benefit.