Proofreading

[Tom Davies]

Hi :)
+1
Fashions keep changing and meaning morph or evolve.

It's difficult to know whether they will change again and difficult to know
exactly what people mean by the words that are in common usage.

I think most people use "app" to mean tiny little program that does just 1
task = ie follows the Unix principles except that *nix programs build on
each other - for example both GPartEd and QtPartEd (i think it changed it's
name a couple years ago) both use the PartEd command-line program to do the
actual work and then PartEd probably uses various libraries and stuff to do
elements of it's job.

So "apps" might be a good way to describe pretty much everything we use
except maybe LibreOffice/OpenOffice and a very few other things.

Also people rarely understand distinctions between technical things so they
probably don't understand the current difference between app, program,
package and suite.  So i find myself already starting to use the word "app"
to describe MS Office, Internet Explorer etc when trying to help people
understand the difference between a program and the operating system.

People DO understand "app", even if imperfectly, where they still don't
understand "program" or "application"!!

So my answer to Hannie's question is still "I dunno" and it'd be
interesting to hear what other people think imo :)  Should we risk using
terms that are in fashion at the moment and that people do kinda
understand?
Regards from
Tom :)



On 26 February 2015 at 11:43, Stephen M. Webb <stephen.webb at canonical.com>
wrote:

> On 15-02-26 06:02 AM, Hannie Dumoleyn wrote:
> > [...]
> > I have a question on the following: is it allowed to use the word "apps"
> instead
> > of "applications"? Example: see page unity-launcher-shapes.html.
>
> While I'm not an expert on current English usage (I never did sew those
> patches on the elbows of my tweed sportcoat) I'd like to point out that the
> word "app" has come to mean small lightweight programs, used on a mobile
> consumer computing device, that provide a branded front-end to a web page
> or related remote API for a web service.  They are generally installed from
> a commercial "store" without any sources available and are an important
> part of the "walled garden of consumption" used by many in place of the
> World Wide Web.  An "application" on the other hand is any program that
> runs locally on a computer, generally a synonym for a program with a
> graphical user interface and likely provides a purpose to the user other
> than feeding eyes to a third-party agency.
>
> I haven't seen any such official definition, but very much noticed this
> difference in usage in both engineering circles and in the media.  I'm sure
> there are some academic papers in there for someone.
>
> So, going by what I experience as popular usage, I would say "app" and
> "application" are not interchangeable terms, and in Ubuntu Desktop Guide we
> want to use the term "application" consistently, at least until convergence
> brings phone apps
> to the desktop.
>
> --
> Stephen M. Webb  <stephen.webb at canonical.com>
>
> --
> ubuntu-doc mailing list
> ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-doc
>
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