Re: Baobab

[Alex Jones <alex weej com>]

Hi

An example of this. When I go to Applications -> Accessories -> "Text
Editor", up pops a window titled "Unsaved Document 1 - gedit".

I think these are the two extremes. I'm not saying we have to prefix
every GNOME application has to be prefixed "GNOME" (i.e. "GNOME Text
Editor", "GNOME Calculator", etc.) but the .desktop file should at least
*partially* match the application name.

On Sun, 2006-08-13 at 16:17 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
> On Sun, 13 Aug 2006, Alex Jones wrote:
> 
> > Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2006 02:22:46 +0100
> > From: Alex Jones <alex weej com>
> > To: Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>
> > Cc: GNOME Desktop Developers Mailing List <desktop-devel-list gnome org>
> > Subject: Re: Baobab
> >
> > You know I only recently noticed that the guys behind Ethereal took the
> > move of renaming it to something slightly less arbitrary - "Wireshark".
> > Smart move. Perhaps we should follow suit with some of our crazily-named
> > apps.
> 
> In the case of Baobab I expect Gnome will have gnome-disk-usage and a
> similar sounding generic name to make keep things relatively easy to
> seperate out later if necessary.
> 
> When it comes to "crazily-named apps" I'm in favour of rebranding them as
> with a rather generic two word /Gnome Thing/ and leaving the more
> interesting names as internal codenames, which is sort of what happens
> already but the internal names get exposed in a lot more places than we
> might ideally like.  In effect this would be doing much like the older
> commercial software vendoers where Gnome becomes the Company/Brand name
> and used as a prefix to a fairly geneneric name.
> 
> Application names are partially abstracted out already by the
> Internationalisation system.  I haven't heard any stories yet of
> application names being accidentally translated into something
> particularly offensive (or any more offensive than the English originals)
> but some allowances would need to be made for local cultures.
> 
> I do think any developer would be wise to fully abstract out the
> application name early on in the development process, just as they would
> plan for portability even if they themselves only use one operating
> system.  (Look at the troubles Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox went through
> with their naming and the eventual result is a whole lot of infrastructure
> which make is easy for anyone to rebrand the program using a simple
> extension.) Should they a developer ever be forced to rebrand it provides
> another opportunity to abstract out the name properly rather than
> performing a rough find and replace and assuming they will never be forced
> to repeat the process.  There may be commerical opportunities for
> specially customized builds or simply cases where developers might want a
> distribution to clearly mark their version as different and properly
> support any troublesome changes they might have made.
>