Re: desktop file summarization



On Wed, 2003-10-29 at 10:53, Dan Winship wrote:
> > 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.

Heh.

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

Sure, the exact method of Name/FunctionalName construction can be flexible.

> 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. :)

Possibly...

> 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, 

Like what?  Most of the icons I see seem to be pretty intuitive.

> the windows have the real name of the app,

The window title probably should change too, although I admit there's a
slippery slope to Seth-land here :)

>  bugzilla only
> refers to the app by its real name, 

That could be fixed too.

> if you have to ask a question on irc
> or wherever, you'll need to know its real name, etc.

Are we targeting people who know how to use IRC?  And in any case, if
someone says "there's a problem with my web browser", certainly it's
fairly clear that they're likely talking about Epiphany.  Likewise for
Internet Explorer on Windows.

> 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. 

Why?

> 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). 

Just because we can't fix everything out there doesn't seem to me to be
a good argument for not fixing it at all.

> Plus, as Seth noted, the developers will never let it happen. :)

Maybe.

> The convention on both Windows and Mac seems to be that "applications"
> often have funky names but "utilities" almost always have obvious names.

I just don't think that "because the other OS does it" is a great
argument for why GNOME should too.

> 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".

Sure.

> 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).

That would certainly be an issue we would be sure to tackle when
switching word processors.

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