New special effects library

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Tuesday 19 December 2006 6:15, Zack Rusin wrote:
> On Tuesday 19 December 2006 07:53, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > here! here! we should be more boring and serious! it's not like we market
> > our development platform to anyone, after all. programmers are just dorks
> > who do what they are told.
>
> yeah, i know, they need cool names not cool technologies to be able to do
> anything.

;-P

> > besides, it's best if we try and blend in with the corporates by trying
> > to be just like them: boring and obvious. i mean, look at the market: Qt
> > ("cute"), Cocoa, Spotlight, dotNet ... yeah, they are so serious slash
> > obvious it hurts.
> >
> > such serious naming also reflects our culture best too. last thing i'd
> > want to do is have some fun and enjoy working with our stuff.
>
> Said the man who even blogged about him having a problem with the Poppler
> name? 

poppler says nothing about pdf's to me. it's named after a cartoon character.
phonon is about media (connection: sound). solid is about hardware (connection 
is obvious). they make sense in that they are related to the topic.

> Come on, I fully respect people's right to name their software 
> whatever they want. I don't like library names that don't reflect what they
> do in some pretty obvious way, if you do then at least be consistant in
> that and not fall into "KDE doing it - good! Others doing it - bad!"
> mentality.

oh, i'm not. i think naming apps with random words is unfortunate for the 
user; e.g. i'm actually more in favour of "KPDF" or "KReader" than i am 
for "Okular" and "Ligature". names need to be pretty obvious for users, with 
large brands being an exception. i also think that naming specific 
technologies with random words is fine for code names but crap for release 
names (e.g. "poppler" is a cool code name for a release but really poor 
choice for a library).

names like "phonon" which relate to the topic (media, in this case) which are 
also catchy are rather nice for the developer. it catches the imagination. it 
also keeps us from naming things KABC. KABC::Address is so much better than 
Phonon::MediaObject, right? also note that Phonon, Solid, etc are namespaces 
rather than class names.

> > p.s. people ask me on a regular basis what "WebKit" is. so even obvious
> > names aren't.
>
> Actually they are, just not to you and you are not their target audience.

actually, it was obvious to me. it isn't obvious to other developers. which 
means you have to learn about the naming scheme if you wish to work on that 
platform ("become part of the target audience") which pretty much completely 
makes my point: non-obvious names are not a liability if the names are 
learnable.

btw, if you are going to name it KImageFX, could you maybe go all the way and 
name it KImageEffects so it's really, realy obvious?

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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