GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 337606
Iagno menu item has a confusing tooltip
Last modified: 2006-04-24 13:23:23 UTC
Forwarded from https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gnome-games/+bug/38436 The tooltip for the "Iagno" menu item says "Play a game of Reversi". Huh? I can think of two likely possibilities: 1. The game is really Reversi. If so, it should be called "Reversi", not "Iagno". 2. It's a mistake. According to Wikipedia, Reversi has two names: Reversi and Othello. If "Iagno" differs noticably from Reversi, the tooltip should be "A Reversi-like game." If it doesn't differ, either: * it should be called "Reversi", with the tooltip "Otherwise known as Othello", or * it should be called "Othello", with the tooltip "Otherwise known as Reversi".
Iagno is Reversi which is also Othello. Othello is by far the most recognised name, but it is trademarked. Instead of going for Reversi the author decided to use a really bad pun (which I happen to like) for the name. It is very little different from Aisleriot's "Play many different solitaire games". The name is an cute anagram, so the purpose has to be described in the tooltip. In the end it is the age old problem for menu labels of "branding" vs. "describing functionality". The usual solution to this problem is to relabel the menu item to use both i.e. "Iagno" to "Iagno Reversi". However I think this is silly. I also don't want to change the name. While I have removed a lot of the explicit GNOME branding, I have tried to keep the more whimsical names (actually, almost anything that wasn't GNOME-something or g-something) like Aisleriot and Iagno. For the record, since I suspect that you (like 90% of this planet) haven't been to the sort of school that teaches Shakespeare, Iago is the bad-guy in the play Othello. The name was then gnome-ified by adding the 'n'.
Thanks for the explanation, I'm perfectly happy with it, although my school 'taught' Shakespeare, I never came across Othello. :-) I'll pass the explanation on.
Hi, original reporter here. Actually the problem here is different from AisleRiot, because the menu item for that is "AisleRiot Solitaire", which follows the HIG. "Iagno" does not, because it doesn't describe what the game is. The tooltip does, but "Play a game of Reversi" causes tooltip rage of the form "WHY DIDN'T YOU SAY THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE". And yes I did study Othello at high school, but there's no mention of "Othello" anywhere, and without that context "Iagno" seems to be a random jumble of letters. If you must keep the name, how about making the menu item "Iagno Reversi"?
I expect patches to fully and consistently use the naming scheme "Iagno Reversi" (Brand+Generic) in the same way as "Aisleriot Solitaire" would be gratefully accepted.