Re: application names in the application menu

[Xavier Claessens <xclaesse gmail com>]

Le vendredi 28 mars 2008 à 18:30 +0100, daniel g. siegel a écrit :
> hi!
> 
> im writing this mail because i am very confused (and no, it is just
> now ;) ). 
> 
> in cheese we plan to change the description of the application menu
> entry, as it is somehow misleading. we want to change it to "Take photos
> and videos with your webcam".
> 
> so far everything seems to be alright. but as vincent untz said on [1]
> 
> "We try hard to not put the name of the programs in the menus, for many
> reasons. It doesn't translate well, for example."
> 
> as we would change our description the application menu entry would look
> like: 
> 
> Cheese - Take photos and videos with your webcam
> 
> recently, i showed some pupils the gnome desktop and what i noticed was,
> that they even didnt know what "Cheese" meaned, or what program would
> open if he had clicked on it. this wasnt only on cheese, but also on
> epiphany, dasher, and others (some choose their name like "[name]
> [small description]", e.g. f-spot photo manager, which is more
> understandable, even if the program name doesnt make sense for a person,
> which is new to gnome). They just could figure it out, by interpreting
> the icon.
> 
> now i learned, that it was very confusing to have names like nautilus,
> epiphany, cheese for a guy, who hears those names for the first time. so
> it would be better to have menu entries like "Texteditor" (gedit) or
> "Document viewer" (evince). but then, who would know how the application
> should be called? how could he then submit a bug report to _that_
> program? how can the person find the projects website on a search
> engine? is a program name senseless?
> 
> please clarify this issue for me ;) 
> 
> [1]: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=512091

I think that's why we have the help->about dialog with the name of the
application and the website. Isn't that enough? In my opinion showing in
the "applications" menu what the app does instead of the application's
name is *really* good. Last time I looked windows is was thinks like
"Start->programs->Sierra->Half-Life->Half-Life" which is complete
non-sense.

Xavier Claessens.

Xavier Claessens.