Giving up our applications' identity? (was: Re: KDE)

[Jakob Petsovits]

On Wednesday, 16. January 2008, Tom Albers wrote:
> I think it is very important to keep your identity/brand in the sidebar and
> everywhere.  I just think it's wrong that every calculator has the same
> icon. I'm not saying that you should make them all, just don't change them
> to a generic one. In the start menu, I recognise the application mostly by
> the icon - and I do care which calculator is started ;-). Just mho. But as
> I don't interfere with artists' work, I will leave it to you.

I have no intention of offending application maintainers, and if you want to 
keep Mailody branded in all places then this is how it will be done. I'm not 
claiming my opinion to be the ultimate truth, just wanted to give input.

My personal opinion is that the default sidebar (KMail, KOrganizer, 
KAddressBook) should not be branded, because I don't see why new users need 
to see a big "E" for their mail view. That's focusing on the technical basis 
instead of how users see it.

If a user has Mailody installed then she will probably know why it shows up 
branded in Kontact, but it doesn't matter for a new Linux convert trying out 
Kubuntu for the first time that KMail can also be run standalone and has its 
own identity. At the beginning, they just want a nice replacement for 
Outlook. Imho.

So, no opposition to branding if it doesn't negatively affect usability of a 
default installation. Now you just need to tell me that usability is not an 
issue and the sidebar looks just as nice if the app icon is used, and I'm 
totally cool with mail client maintainers scrapping view-pim-mail and using 
branded icons everywhere.