On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 4:03 PM, Caio Chassot <[email protected]> wrote: > - ".app": Let's knock that shit off already. Do you say iTunes.app?
Speaking as someone who writes and edits documentation for normal people, adding .app to the name is really, really awkward. Personally, I think the name Letters sounds too generic - things like Eudora and Firefox are far easier to refer to and brand, since there's never any confusion about what they refer to. But that boat seems to have sailed already. In TidBITS and Take Control, our style guide is to use "Apple Mail" because Mail.app is an unfriendly way to refer to a program when talking with people who may not have the foggiest idea what an application bundle is, or possibly even a filename extension (and of course, most people will never see the .app, doubling the confusion). It's also a problem because "Mail" at the start of a sentence is ambiguous - it could refer to the program or to the content in the program. Even Apple's other fairly generic names - Preview, Terminal, Finder, etc - don't run into that confusion in our experience writing about them. Letters sounds generic, but in context, and properly capitalized, it won't be ambiguous, so there's no need for the awkward Letters.app as a name. cheers... -Adam Look into my head; follow me on Twitter. http://twitter.com/adamengst _____________________________________________________________________ Adam C. Engst: I publish TidBITS and Take Control, write books, [email protected] and make useful introductions in the Mac industry. My work: http://www.tidbits.com/ and http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/ _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list List help: http://lists.ranchero.com/listinfo.cgi/email-init-ranchero.com
