[jreeve]

This reminds me very much of how the genesis of ideographic writing (such as Chinese characters) was related to me. I'm not at all certain that it is correct, but gist of it was that these forms of writing start with illustrations but gradually become encoded over time.

[1337p337]

Not only that, but the author also seems annoyed by older terminology taking new meanings, as with "radio buttons", "bookmarks", and "folders".

The irony here is that he has no problem calling the device he uses a "computer", despite the older definition no longer holding true, or especially referring to "files", which is certainly not a term used in the old sense.

Dijkstra's "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science" rails against analogies (the source of these terms) at length, but I'm not certain that there's much validity to the argument when the new meaning of the term eclipses the old one.

[__alexs]

I quite like the idea of doing an app where all the icons are Chinese ideographs with native language tooltips and descriptions.

It would be a little like living in the Firefly universe but with more iPhones.

[goblin89]

It won't make much sense to do in one app. Users (except for Firefly fans and/or Chinese learners) will hate it, because the complex design of hanzi is optimized for having thousands of these characters to distinguish between.

Now, if we had all the icons in all apps replaced consistently with Chinese simplified characters—that would be fun. I don't think it would be such a disaster (except to icon design business profits), after we rediscover how functions map to pictures again we'll continue to utilize UIs as usual. Admittedly a bit slower because of more complex hanzi shape, but without having to deal with badly designed or inconsistently used icons[0].

And also we'll be sure that when a new concept appears we will have an icon for that. If not—well, we'll start combining hanzi.

[0] An example of one such goof: http://plus.google.com/photos/108564542236590882918/albums/p...