KDE Programs Naming Convention

[Colin Pinkney]

On Wednesday 09 Jan 2008, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> There really should be a movement towards better names. What the hell
> is K3B? And what program should I burn a disk with?
>
> Microsoft has great names: Office for an office suit, Internet
> Explorer for an Internet web browser, Media Player for a media player.
> Ask someone off the street what Amarok or Firefox do, and you will get
> a blank stare.

This is my KDE menu:

http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/1512/menugo8.png

I can't remember if the settings are the default in Kubuntu, but it's 
certainly very easy to put the application description next to the name 
(Right click panel->Panel Menu->Configure Panel->Menus). So what is so 
confusing about this?

As other people in this thread have pointed out, there are plenty of weirdly 
named applications on Windows too and people simply get used to them like a 
brand name. In fact if an application gets so popular its name becomes 
synonymous with the application type, like people call PDFs "Acrobat files" 
or say a picture was "Photoshopped".

And have you ever tried Googling for something like 'Media Player'? Yes, you 
get MS Windows Media Player as the top hit, simply because of how many people 
use it since it is bundled with Windows, but that's no good if you're after 
help on a specific KDE media player (and if we're talking about computer 
novices they probably will not know to put "KDE" in their search terms 
either).

Certainly if there is an opportunity to create a unique name that also hints 
at its functionality we should go with that and I thought there had been a 
slight push towards this for main KDE apps that were being renamed/rewritten 
for KDE 4 although I can't think of any that they have really achieved with 
this.

-- 
Colin Pinkney
http://www.cpinkney.org.uk