Re: Application names

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

On 8/10/09, William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com> wrote:
>  On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 5:12 AM, Vincent Untz<vuntz gnome org> wrote:
[...]
>  > Two questions:
>  >
>  >  + unless I missed something, Colin's patch is for gnome-panel only.
>  >   What about "Open With", and all the other places where we display the
>  >   applications?
>
> An excellent point.  And we should probably consider each of these
>  individually.  It is a little strange that we are designing FullName
>  proposal around the implementation details of gnome-panel.  There are
>  at least two cases for open with.  We have menu entries in context
>  menus on files and we have the full "Open With" dialog.  My thinking
>  currently is that "open with" menu should simply use the Name.  Since:
>   * The default handler is already set and doesn't need to be discovered
>   * If you are looking for a specific app you know the name
>   * We don't show the comment either (which is really essential for
>  discovery) since we assume you recognize the name already
>   * If you don't find it there you can go into the dialog for for discovery
>
>  The "Open With" dialog is another story and has a number of design
>  problems.  Won't go into those here.
>
>  Technically, if we follow the logic of FullName (which is really just
>  the gnome-panel name) we should also add a OpenWithLabel to the
>  desktop file or have translatable "actions" since the following is
>  also wrong:
>  g_strdup_printf (_("Open with %s"), g_app_info_get_name (application));
>
>  Right?  Unless we don't consider names to be translated or require
>  articles or the resulting string to be a proper sentence.

This is an interesting point. Yes, an OpenWithLabel is probably
actually needed for translation reasons. Another example, using
Swedish:

"Open with" -> "Öppna med"

but

Wrong: "Öppna med Webbläsaren Epiphany"
Correct: "Öppna med webbläsaren Epiphany"

The reason is that the capitalization rules in Swedish (and this is
true for many languages) are rather strict compared to English; only
the beginning of sentences and proper names must ever be capitalized.
Concepts like book title capitalization does not exist in Swedish and
would be considered a grammatical error.

But this is of course a whole other issue.


>  >  + translators have stated that it's wrong to do "Name - GenericName"
>  >   programmatically. So, hrm, why would we not listen to them?
>
> That hasn't been established.  In the xdg-list thread one of the last
>  comments from Christian Rose said this:
>  "Webbläsare - Epiphany" or "Webbläsare (Epiphany)" is not wrong per
>  se, it's just bad language style."

I was using Swedish as an example as it is my mother tongue. And your
question was about my specific example, using Swedish. That does not
imply that this issue may have, and probably has, other implications
on some of the world's other several thousand languages! Please do not
generalize. In my experience, it is better not to assume too much
about other languages and their conformity with English.


Christian