GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 148826
All apps should have distinctive names
Last modified: 2020-12-04 18:20:01 UTC
In the Hig 2.0 section 2 in the "Menu Item Names" section, a very good set of rules for menu entries is laid out except where it is recommended that names like "Gnome Image Viewer" is shortened to "Image Viewer". The problem is that "Image Viewer" does not provide any differentiation from any other image viewer that might be installed. If there are to be a special set of applications that are "the" default apps for gnome and hence should have these special generic names, then that should be defined in the hig as well. Otherwise, it should be made very clear that shortening "GNOME Image viewer" to "Image Viewer" is *not* ok. Instead the suggestion should be that each application should have a unique identifying title that sufficiently differentiates it from other similar applications and the the technology used to create the app is by itself *not* an adequate differentiator (eg GNOME, GTK, KDE, etc) unless said app has been blessed by gnome and the hig as *the* default for eternity. In which case the app *should* in fact be called, for example, "Gnome Image Viewer" to communicate to the user the special status of the application. Either way this needs to be clarified. There are many apps who are, because of the ambiguity of this section, are using this section as a guidline outside of the spirit of the HIG's suggestions. For example, epiphany, from your examples should be named "Epiphany Web Browser" in the application menus. However, they have shortened their name to simply "Web Browser" in the menu. Other applications have followed suit. This may be a result of legitimate confusion or a ploy to solidify some special de-facto default app status via naming abuses. It does not matter what the motives are. There can be no legitimate discourse on the issue of particular applications until a clear naming policy has been defined in the HIG.
I think there is an option to display both appname and generic name in the menus. Aside from that it possible to put something in the Guidelines warned developers to be careful about not making their generic name too generic. (ie GIMP is not an Image Viewer and gThumb and fspot may be image viewers but are better described as Image Browsers, or Photo Albums). I'm really not sure though, can you suggest a specific wording and where exactly in the Guidelines you think this should go? Resetting Priority and severity, they are normally left for the developer/maintainer to decide.
You have missed the point of this bug entirely. The problem is not that people are setting the generic name incorrectly, the problem is that people are setting the appname so that it *is* generic. For example, Eye of Gnome appears in my menus as "Image Viewer" even when my menus are otherwise showing the app names, not the generic name. That this is incorrect is not made clearn in the HIG at all. Epiphany used to do the same thing. Gthumb still appears in my menu as "Photo Tool". Gnome-pdf does this, it appears as "PDF Viewer". GGV appears as "PS Viewer". You are right that these apps all need bugs filed against them but the root of the problem is that the HIG does not make it clear that this is wrong. As for the priority and severity, this bug in the hig, which propagates to the apps and then into user's menus, is a major UI problem. It makes the naming in the menus very inconsistent and confusing.
Another problem with this is user expectation. For example, the user selects "Archive manager" from the GNOME Applications menu, and a window appears titled "File Roller". This is confusing: the user thinks "what just happened? I asked for Archive manager and I got this instead!"
This carries over to documentation. The user manual for the application that calls itself 'Eye of GNOME' in its title bar is called 'Image Viewer Manual'. For 'Rhythmbox', 'Music Player Manual'. I understand the motivation behind simplifying the entries in the Application menu, but when carried to the rest of the desktop it creates a mess. There is also a problem with the Open With menu in Nautilus: I have Bluefish installed as well as gedit. But they are in different categories in the Applications menu, so gedit is still displayed as only 'Text Editor'. But in the Open With menu, they are together. So I get a choice of 'Bluefish' and 'Text Editor' which isn't very useful.
I just wanted to chime in and say that as an Ubuntu (6.10) user this has annoyed me for some time. I think it's a real problem that the _real_ name of the apps is 'hidden' by generic names. In many cases this seems to be fixed in my menu: Galeon is 'Galeon Web Browser' and gthumb is 'gThumb Image Viewer' but file roller is just 'Archive Manager'.
I also just noticed that this bug has no milestone - I think that's unfortunate so I request that someone gives it a milestone.
I can confirm that I've seen some confusion due to this issue. With all the previous comments, I'm going to confirm the bug.
There have certainly been some more recent discussions about all this: <http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2008-July/msg00165.html> <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2009-July/010807.html> so we need to make sure the outcome of all that is addressed in HIG 3.x, for which planning is well underway. Setting milestone accordingly.
Generic names are used by core applications (see https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Apps/ ), and this is documented. Since the HIG is intended for a wide audience of application developers, I don't think it is the right place to document the naming convention for core apps.