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

[Joshua Haberman <joshua haberman com>]

Colin Walters wrote:

>On Fri, 2003-08-15 at 10:54, in7y118@public.uni-hamburg.de wrote:
>  
>
>>They shouldn't learn a fancy brand name, they should learn the name of the 
>>thing they use, so they can easily describe it. 
>>    
>>
>
>By that logic though, people should also learn the difference between a
>CPU, a motherboard, and a hard disk.  But we shouldn't expect people
>to.
>

I don't think this holds, because you don't directly interact with the 
innards of your computer in the course of normal operation, you interact 
with applications.  People have referred to applications by name for as 
long as there have been personal computers, and it has never been a 
problem.  Outlook, Internet Explorer, Wordperfect, VisiCalc, WinAmp; 
people don't wrestle with these things, on the contrary it gives 
recognizable names that make it easier to communicate about them.  It 
seems a bit patronizing to presume that a person cannot learn the name 
of an application they use on a regular basis.  Rhythmbox is certainly 
more catchy than "Media Player," and more specific.

"Media Player" is also more namespace-polluting.  Even if you stipulate 
that Rhythmbox is the single sanctioned app of its type for GNOME, it 
isn't particularly fit for quickly playing a single file, and it doesn't 
do video at all.  If other apps come along that want to fill these gaps 
(for example gst-player) you suddenly have other media players that 
aren't "Media Player."

IMO, there's no sense in mixing proper and common nouns.  Rhythmbox is a 
media player, but referring to it as "Media Player" is ambiguous and 
unhelpful.

I can understand the rationale for referring to it as "Media Player" in 
contexts where the user might not know what "Rhythmbox" is yet: in 
context menus and the "start" menu.  But even that can be confusing 
because if the user *does* know what Rhythmbox is, they could (at least 
I would) wonder just what "Media Player's" music library I was adding 
something to.  Furthermore, I think that within the application 
referring to it as Rhythmbox is the most helpful (for example the "Add 
to Media Player libary" menu item).  By this point, they have seen the 
splash screen and title bar (hypothetically) that both say "Rhythmbox," 
and so the name has been established.

Josh