[Desktop_architects] application names in menu

Calum Benson Calum.Benson at Sun.COM
Tue Feb 27 10:36:48 PST 2007


On Sun, 2007-02-25 at 12:23 +0100, Thilo Pfennig wrote:

> Are these issues that should be determines by a distribution or by a
> desktop? Have these issues been discussed somewhere  more generally
> for desktops  at some point? if yes, please forward URLs.

FWIW, the background to the GNOME HIG guidelines on this topic[1] is
that the HIG team originally suggested that core GNOME desktop apps be
named by function only.  Mostly this was to (a) avoid having a bunch of
menu items whose purpose wasn't immediately obvious ("Evolution?
Epiphany?"), and (b) to avoid having a bunch of menu items that all
began with "GNOME".

Since, ideally, there should only be one core Text Editor app, one core
Dictionary app etc., the idea was then that other apps could (should)
use their project name as well as a functional name, e.g. "Abiword Word
Processor", so you could install multiple text editors without a name
clash, but still know at a glance which was the
core/official/actively-maintained 'GNOME text editor'.

Unsuprisingly, some maintainers felt that this would result in a loss of
identity for their project, so the compromise was to allow core apps to
use their project name ('gedit', 'file roller' or whatever[2]) in their
title bar, where appropriate.  So that's kind of where GNOME is now,
until we get around to the next major HIG revision at least.

Some related discussions crop up from time to time:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2004-June/msg00074.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-July/msg00126.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-doc-list/2006-February/msg00077.html
> 
Cheeri,
Calum.

[1]http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/desktop-integration.html#menu-item-names
[2] I'm not pointing the finger at those apps/maintainers btw, they're
just two that I have open right now!

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson at sun.com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems




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