On 9 Mar 2006, at 23:02, David-John Burrowes wrote: >>> It also seems like we're trying to hide the real program name and >>> would be a bit >>> insulting to the communities who work on producing them. >> >> Well, to be fair, this is what the community version of GNOME does >> too, and has done for years, so we're not doing anything they don't >> approve of. >> >> (The original community plan was that core GNOME apps really would be >> called "Text Editor" rather than "gedit", for example, but some >> maintainers understandably got a bit stroppy about that, so the >> compromise was to use generic names on the menus for core apps, and >> keep the application name in the application itself, although >> preferably just in its About box.) > > That's interesting. Any idea why the community wanted to do that?
Partly because, cute project names aside, anything that's part of the core GNOME desktop shouldn't /really/ need to identify itself as any more than "the GNOME text editor", "the GNOME terminal", "the GNOME calculator" etc. It's only when you install some funky third-party app that does the same thing that some disambiguation is necessary. Also, it was an effort to somewhat move away from an app-centric view of things, but without the pain of trying to invent a completely doc- centric UI. The theory being that users are more interested in what they want to do, rather than the arbitrary name of the application they need to open to use it: "I want to send an email", "I want to browse the web", "I want to open a spreadsheet"... hence the preference for applications called "Email", "Web Browser" and "Spreadsheet", rather than "Evolution", "Firefox" and "OpenOffice Calc". (Bear in mind again that we were squarely targetting Joe-call- center and Jo-bank-clerk in those days, who were likely to have more pressing things to do with their time than worry about what "Firefox" or "Evolution" meant.) In Sun's case, another factor was that initially we made a conscious decision to ship just one application for each of those tasks, so there was no need for additional disambiguation. That went off the rails a bit in later releases when we started throwing in all sorts of unsupported Java apps and technology previews, though. > I'd be curious to see what it looks like now... yet, I'm still biased > against it showing. A static image showing "alive" and "dead" seem > like > it would be sufficient? (at the same time, I suppose in this day and > age where so much of one's life involves interacting with the network, > one is probably more likely to notice the network is down because > one's > browser or mail client doesn't work. So, maybe I should ask before > suggesting the thing should or shouldn't be removed: what problem > is it > solving? There's no doubt it partly came into being "because Windows has one", but a number of people have said that they like the reassurance of seeing at a glance that their network is functional (or not) when troubleshooting. Also, for wireless networks, it shows the current signal strength, which is quite handy I guess. Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:calum.benson at sun.com Java Desktop System Team http://blogs.sun.com/calum +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems
