G'day all,
Just a couple of general thoughts about project naming, since OBS got
a mention and I'm presently confused about Bretzn....
Weird spelling, capitalization and punctuation. As a writer, it's a
pain in the neck!
I understand that people want to create a unique, memorable name, and
use the typeface to create a brand, but this is counter-productive if
it's too easy for others to get it wrong. So people need to think
about how others might spell the name and will they care - will we get
an email from a dozen people on a development team when we write
'EzyApp' instead of 'Ezy-APP'.?
For example, Linux Format, an excellent publication, had every
instance of openSUSE spelled with a capital 'O'. When I raised this
recently on the forum - about openSUSE always being correct - I was
told it was a petty, meaningless thing to worry about; and that years
of English grammar outweighed branding, and they'd put a capital at
the start of the sentence, thanks anyway. (I should add those were
comments from readers, not magazine representatives).
It needs mental effort (and sometimes a check on the wiki) to write
the correct format or risk 'getting it wrong' - we should make it easy
for people to get it right. Google mostly ignores punctuation, but
that's also unhelpful in other ways. A search for edu li-f-e didn't
have openSUSE anywhere in sight. Using one-word names that are used
for something else makes a google search very useless! Sure, we then
stick 'openSUSE' in front of it and hopefully come up with the project
we are looking for. Anyway, Edu Li-F-E is one that I'd really like to
see changed to something simpler and 'cleaner' looking in print.
With most of our existing projects I think they are too established to
change, but as new things are being developed, I hope we might
encourage people to think about these aspects too - not only something
unique, but also straightforward and easy to 'get right'.
Capitals at the start of words, or at the start of word abbreviations
is reasonably easy - eg, AppStore as in ApplicationStore - and all
caps, such as KDE is easy. Insisting on lower case at the start of a
word can be problematic, though with iPod you'd think people would be
used to it - and varied use of caps and lower case is difficult. Any
sort of punctuation is a pain, because you have to remember it as a
'dash', and sometimes you need escape codes and sometimes it can have
other meanings... overall, bad idea.
While I think of it - Maybe if you're German, maybe Bretzn isn't a
good choice, but it's at least straightforward and memorable to me as
an English speaker, and it gives me a bunch of openSUSE/Bretzn google
hits straight up. Win!
Anyway, I know we have more pressing matters right now with 11.4 on
the way, but I just wanted to share those thoughts!
cheers,
Helen
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