Re: Application names in menus

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> The problme being that users want to have TechnoBabble 1.2, TechnoBabble
> 2.3 and TechnoBabble 2.4rc1 installed, and appear in a comprehencible way
> not just three sets of three identical looking items 'Technobabble'
> 'Technobabble plugin manager' and 'Technobabble updater' from which you
> can't tell which applies to which version.

Then we should have smarts that put version numbers in the menus only
when there are duplicates of the same application. But honestly.... I
don't think this is really true.

I don't have a single duplicate application on my system. I bet a lot of
Linux users don't, just because existing package systems don't let you.
And I'm hearing outrageous screaming about this either. I notice big
multi-user boxes often have a couple versions, but I don't commonly see
this on single user boxes (either Linux boxes or Windows boxes (where
its technically easy to do)).

There are cases of course; e.g. going back to the web designer who needs
to test multiple versions of browsers. But they aren't the standard
case. A lot of usability is about trying to keep the edge cases from
polluting the standard case.

-Seth