There are many problems in this world – some big, some small, some so minute nobody ought to put them to paper at all. The problem I’m going to highlight here is even smaller than that. This literally – the actual literally – does not matter and absolutely nobody should care about it, let alone put any work into changing it or addressing it some other way.
I want to talk about the iconography GNOME’s Disks utility uses to symbolise “mount” and “unmount”. No, I’m not descending into madness.
GNOME’s Disks utility uses the “play” symbol on the mount button, and the “stop” symbol on the unmount button. Inexplicably, considering the state of the world in general and the rapidly deteriorating quality of software specifically, this bothers me. Out in the real world, built on decades of consistent use, these symbols have gained clearly defined meanings, and mounting and unmounting disks definitely isn’t one of them.
In fact, the meaning of these symbols isn’t mere convention; they’re defined in a variety of international standards for symbols for use in software and on equipment, such as ISO/IEC 18035 (which you need to buy to read; my copy fell of a truck):
ISO/IEC 18035:2002 defines a consistent set of icons and related functions that are represented by multimedia applications on a computer screen and that users interact with to control such applications. It describes controls applying to such functions as: Play, Pause, Stop, Rewind, Scan forward, Scan backward, Replay backward, Loop, Go to beginning, Go to previous, Go to next, Go to end, Set volume and Mute.
↫ ISO/IEC 18035:2003
They’re also part of ISO 7000/IEC 60417, a much larger, more encompassing standard that also contains things like the various symbols used on laundry machines, tumble dryers, in cars, and so on. The symbols themselves are much older than the standards, of course, with many of them dating back to the 1960s and possibly even 1950s. The point remains, though: the play and stop symbols have clearly defined meanings, and I don’t think they are at all a good fit for mount and unmount.
The function of the “play” symbol according to ISO/IEC 18035:
To enable the user to start the presentation of dynamic media, except where the task requires automatic playing of that media.
↫ ISO/IEC 18035:2003
And of the “stop” symbol:
To enable the user to stop the presentation of dynamic media.
↫ ISO/IEC 18035:2003
Neither of these descriptions match what mounting and unmounting mean or do. Mounting a drive or partition doesn’t present any media at all; it merely makes the drive or partition in question accessible. Unmounting also doesn’t eject anything; it merely makes the drive or partition inaccessible. I would argue that play and pause act upon contents of a drive or volume, and not upon the drive or volume itself. As it stands right now, you “play” a drive” to “play” a video stored on said drive.
Madness.
I already know what you’re thinking, and yes, I agree that the Disks utility is a tool aimed at more advanced use cases and users, and most normal, average users will never even know it exists, let alone open it at all. Very few people get to see these symbols, and those that do already know full well what mounting and unmounting mean, reducing the importance of said symbols considerably. But now it’s time for the big surprise, the twist in the story that turns this entire thing on its head.
Files, GNOME’s file manager, uses an entirely different symbol for unmounting! Instead of the “stop” symbol, Files uses the “eject” symbol. You may think this is a more accurate visual representation of what unmounting means, but I strongly disagree. Let’s turn to ISO/IEC 18035:2003 once again:
To enable the user to eject the current physical media from the appropriate drive.
↫ ISO/IEC 18035:2003
Unmounting doesn’t eject anything! If you unmount a USB stick, the stick doesn’t get fired out of the USB port. If you unmount a volume, it doesn’t get removed from the SSD. Hell, if you unmount a CD-ROM, it doesn’t even eject it! Ejecting a CD-ROM – opening the drive’s tray or spitting the CD-ROM out of a slot-loader – is an entirely different act! Are we really “ejecting” a CD-ROM twice? Are we “mounting” a CD-ROM when we merely close the tray? No!
Madness!
The real underlying problem here is, of course, that mounting and unmounting are deeply weird and confusing concepts, bordering on the esoteric, that simply do not have physical equivalents to fall back on. Using symbols and iconography designed in the 1960s explicitly for playing music or stopping a video or ejecting a cassette tape are not a good fit for something as difficult to explain to most people as mounting and unmounting. It’s like putting an eject symbol on a car’s door handle or a play symbol on a soap dispenser.
Should GNOME developers waste any time or resources to address this? No, of course not, that would be stupid. Nobody should care about this but me. I should suffer in silence, every time I need to mount or unmount something, forced to look for an eject or stop symbol in whatever user interface I happen to be using. Every time, I should die a little inside. Please, don’t be like me and waste precious resources thinking about this.
I’m not descending into madness. I just want mount and unmount symbols that make sense.
I’m not descending into madness.
