Re: desktop file summarization

[Dan Winship <danw ximian com>]

> Havoc: The menu entries should always be "Name FunctionalName", as a
> literal reading of the current HIG suggests.

I agree 100% with the person who said that that's just evil
grammatically. An Epiphany Web Browser is for browsing the epiphany web,
an Evolution Address Book is for storing Charles Darwin's phone number,
and after seeing Pulp Fiction, I don't even want to know what you do
with a GIMP Image Editor.

(I'm not claiming that people will actually misunderstand the text, I'm
just saying it makes the menus read like they were poorly translated
from another language.)

"Name (Generic)" or "Generic (Name)" are both much better. Or even
"Name - Marketing blather!"

> Jeff,Colin: The menu entries should be FunctionalName, until the system
> administrator chooses to present 2 of the same FunctionalName
> applications to the user, in which case we disambiguate in a
> programmatic fashion.

So if functional names are better than project names, shouldn't the
startup splash screen just say "Desktop" instead of "GNOME"? Users don't
care what desktop they're running. :)

The other problem with this idea is that the menu text is then at odds
with *everything else*. The icons often only make sense if you know the
real name, the windows have the real name of the app, bugzilla only
refers to the app by its real name, if you have to ask a question on irc
or wherever, you'll need to know its real name, etc.

> Seth: All applications which are part of GNOME should simply be renamed
> entirely, in every user visible way, to FunctionalName.  As a side
> effect, this ensures that in the default GNOME menu the user will only
> see FunctionalName.

This gets rid of the consistency problem, but it would be a lot harder
for us than it is for Microsoft. Eg, Epiphany would have to bump its
version number to something higher than the last GNOME-shipped version
of Galeon. And it still leaves things ambiguous for apps that aren't
part of GNOME but are likely to be in the menus in most distros (eg,
GIMP). Plus, as Seth noted, the developers will never let it happen. :)

The convention on both Windows and Mac seems to be that "applications"
often have funky names but "utilities" almost always have obvious names.
I think that makes sense (and is more likely to get hacker buy-in). No
user really cares that gucharmap is a completely different codebase from
gcharmap, so it makes sense to just call both of them "Character Map". 
But you can't just have "Word Processor" be AbiWord in one release and
OpenOffice in the next (especially if OOo doesn't handle AbiWord files).

-- Dan