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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