Re: program binary names

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> When fooling with this, it wouldn't hurt to look at the menu proposal
> for GNOME 2 (I don't have the URL handy), which proposes some naming
> conventions for the Name field in .desktop files, and also proposes
> renames for some specific apps.

http://usability.gnome.org/proposals/menus.html

Nils has done a terrific job on this and its pretty stable at this point
as you can probably guess by the revision history ;-) That said, we only
did this for apps in gnome-core or gnome-utils for the most part, so we
realize more categories will probably be needed. If you'd like to
suggest other general categories of applications that would be great.
We'd like to keep them to major categories of use though (e.g. we are
not going to have a category for "Terminals" just because there are lots
of terminals, on the other hand creating a category for science and
engineering applications is likely). I don't want as many categories as
Debian, say, but several more general categories wouldn't hurt. Try to
think of categories that include lots of applications that would be used
in similar contexts by users.

If you are looking at modifying your own application, I also suggest you
at least scan:

http://usability.gnome.org/hig/desktop-integration.html

This is a first draft and is hence potentially subject to a lot of
change, but it explains the general principles behind the menu proposal
and how to best fit in with the new menu system.

In terms of the "Functional description" stuff, George will be making
this a field in .desktop files, so the most important thing is to have a
functional description planned, changing names right now would be
premature. We'd also like a list of potential functional descriptions,
so people don't end up generating different descriptions for similar
applications (for example "Email Client" and "Email" and "Mail").
Eventually the desktop integration page will contain a list of
functional descriptions that should be used if your application fits the
bill. Functional descriptions are a *lot* more specific than menu
categories, so "Terminal" would here be appropriate. We want to make
sure all areas of applications are represented (if no description fits
your application you are free to create one, but we'd like the standard
to cover as much right off the bat as possible)
 
> Better app names could be a noticeable UI enhancement for 2.0.

That would be a lovely change. Ximian has done this, and I think the
results have been largely positive.

cheers,

-Seth