I just upgraded my iPad to iOS7, and have mixed views on the changes overall. The new functionality seems in general to be useful, but the flat design seems to be less clear than the old one and in particular some of the icons are really not intuitive or clear to me.
I’ve found one thing which particularly annoys me in the Mail application though:
My iPad is set to use British English, and Trash is not a British term! It’s also inconsistent when there’s a perfectly good wastebin icon on the email screen itself.
This started a train of thought about a similar icon/term which has always bothered me:
Why is is called a Recycle Bin ?
Stuff I put in our physical recycle bin gets taken away, cut up, washed / melted, and reworked into a range of new items, which I don’t personally get back. If I expected to put in a Word document and get back an Excel with numbers from a bunch of other people maybe the analogy would be more accurate.
To be fair there are some similarities:
- I always forget to empty both the electronic and real form of the bins until we run out of space.
- A file is always needed just after emptying, and newspaper is always needed for surface protection the day after it is recycled.
I wonder what the correct term for this electronic store would be? Options I’ve thought of:
Attic – much better metaphore, but can’t really picture the icon for this.
Celler – not very common in British English.
Garage – having a car on the icon would clearly cause confusion!