Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] [patch] add icon to nautilus context menu

[in7y118 public uni-hamburg de]

Quoting Luis Villa <louie@ximian.com>:

> I hate to beat a dead horse here, but wrong, wrong, _wrong_ thinking. My
> mother has no clue what RB is. My brother (who is fairly computer
> skilled, but not with Linux) has no idea what rhythmbox is. Why should
> they need to learn/know what rhythmbox is just to add something to it?
> The real kicker is that they both use iTunes all the time- so they would
> definitely want rhythmbox on linux, even if they didn't know what it
> was. Why should they need to learn a fancy brand name to play their
> music?
> 
They shouldn't learn a fancy brand name, they should learn the name of the 
thing they use, so they can easily describe it. People invent names for all 
kinds of things to make describing them easier. You're not the "bugfixing guy", 
you're Luis whenever I talk with/about you, even though knowing the first thing 
is much more important.
Oh, and I bet your family can easily remember what iTunes is. It's not "the 
music player on my mac", it's iTunes.
Let me list the main reasons why I think $generic_discription instead of $name 
sucks:
- No differentiation between competing products. I'll never know how to help my 
friend who couldn't figure out why adding to the music library didn't work. 
Maybe because of a bug in zinf? Maybe it's a konqueror issue?
- That's close to the first point, but ease of recognization (for lack of a 
better word). I just googled for "Rhythmbox". Guess what was the top 1 result. 
And I googled for "music player". iTunes was #16, Rhythmbox wasn't top 50.
- There's confusion, too. We're distributing a package called Rhythmbox. Either 
we change that to read music player too and stop using the name Rhythmbox 
alltogether or we'll end up creating confusion. "Hey, I had this music player 
installed on this other computer, but I can't find it in my package list." I 
don't even know if apt-cache search music player would show Rhythmbox.

> Anyway, I hate to get snappy about this, but... we've got a /huge/
> advantage over the proprietary OSes because we don't have to name things
> in weird 'brand' ways to get them known. Let's use that advantage to
> make our systems more usable than they can. 
> 
I agree that we should use "Music Player" anywhere possible where people might 
not know what Rhythmbox is, but we always need to include "Rhythmbox" there 
too, because "music player" is much too generic and can't therefoire be used 
everywhere.

> This is a consistent complaint in every
> usability study of linux ever done- 'oh, there are six web browsers
> installed and I have no idea what the difference is between them.' With
> simple, consistent naming and a clear choice of best-of-breed
> applications, we can really make computers more usable for people.
>
This is really not so easy. It might be reasonably easy for a distribution to 
only ship 1 music player, but it's not THE music player for the rest of the 
world. And I'm more concerned with the rest of the world.


Cheers,
music player maintainer