Re: Application names in menus

[snickell stanford edu]

> If you want to make it worse, it turns out that I can't actually use
> "OpenOffice Writer" or "OpenOffice Word Processor" because of some
> trademark issue (see FAQ on openoffice.org), it has to say 
> "OpenOffice.org Word Processor" *ugh*

Yeah. This is really too bad, and not their fault. I sort of wish they
had rennamed rather than pushing the .org, but I understand they already
had market momentuum invested in the other name. Ah well.

> The most obnoxious menu issue is what to do with all the _other_
> apps
> that are duplicates (we have default web browser, then the other 6;
> where do those 6 go). Yeah I know the non-crack answer is "nowhere"

For web browser though, there's a little out... Namely, I think the web
browser should be in displayed in the root of the Applications menu
(possibly in addition to being internet, but possibly in place of).
Pretty much everyone wants convenient access to web browsers (the
evidence in my mind being that pretty much everyone who knows how to
create launchers has a launcher on the panel for their web browser ;-)

But for other things. Say having two word processors. Well, if you're
going to install them, I think you should put them in the same place. To
do otherwise will probably end up being rather confusing. As you point
out, its worth considering if you could install only one, but that's not
*always* going to be the right answer.

One idea I've been toying around with in conjunction with the tasks
based menu (since applications could register themselves as handling
generic tasks like "can create spreadsheet") is allowing some sort of
filtering in the menus. So there's a preference page that allows you to
choose the preferred web browser, e-mailer, word processor, spreadsheet,
 chat program, whatever. GNOME by default shows only your preferred item
in the menus then with the generic name. Then allow people to turn on
other menu items that fill that category manually (this probably isn't
too common, but there are cases like web designers who need to view
their work in a couple different browsers say). I'm not sure yet how to
make the "turn on" functional obvious, non-annoying, and non-crack, but
I think/hope it can be done.

This is also a good solution for administered multi-user systems. You
don't want to have every application in the world visible in every
user's menus because the menus would overload. On the other hand, people
do have strong opinions about which application they want to use (and
since they're not administering that machine, if that app isn't
installed they can't use it). This way the machine default could have
"Web browser" set to Mozilla, but the 5% of users who really like Opera
could set their preferred web browser to opera: without inflicting the
burden of another menu entry on the users who don't care about opera.

It also might be a good solution for distros who want to ship non-crack
default setups for people who just want to "browse the web" or "read
email", while still accomodating the diversity of application choice
that proliferates in the Linux community.

-Seth