I find that some of the names of applications on Haiku are not intuitive. I think for the sake of user friendliness, Haiku should attempt to make its names more logical. Let’s have some examples:
Poor Man - This sounds almost like it could be a game or a novelty application of some sort. Instead, it is a server application.
CodyCam - Who’s Cody?
DiskProber - It sounds like a hard drive diagnostic tool, but it is actually a hex editor.
The names of other applications are great for the most part, though.
Of course there must be some tooltip «Hex editor “DiskProbe”».
And I would say that intuition thing is tricky, what works for one maybe not work for other.
Those apps all date back to BeOS, whose developers were fairly fond of cute names… [I’m on their side…]
I think the idea here was that this is a quick’n’dirty web server, with minimal “rich” options.
Cody is the (then 14-year old) son of Steve Sakoman, who pestered him to write the app 18 years ago. It was originally designed to show the Be lunchroom on the web!
DiskProbe, actually. Seems reasonable to me. It’s intended to examine the data on a drive and edit it if necessary.
I guess the full name would be “Poor Man’s http server”, as in, it is not a full featured one, but will have to do when you can’t afford something better. We could probably drop it from the image now that we have Python doing the same (with its SimpleHTTPServer) and some better/more serious alternatives in the depot, anyway?
DiskProbe probably started with only disk editing features, and only grew a way to edit plain files later on. I think the name is good enough, even if not exact.
I realize that the names are not intuitive, but they are carryovers from BeOS. That is what Be Inc. called the applications in question. To me it is uniformity/homage to Haiku’s roots in BeOS.
A lot of those application names are inspired from the same applications (by name) that shipped with BeOS. Rememeber, Haiku is inspired by BeOS in and out, which is a good thing
What happened to “RobinHood”? [Another non-intuitive name… ] That always used to work rather well on BeOS – I much preferred it to PoorMan. I just brought it over to Haiku and it seems to run. It was developed at Be, but GPL’d. I see you have it on HaikuArchives, but otherwise it’s sort of buried. Worth making people aware of it?
Edit: Well I guess it doesn’t quite work! The server runs and everything, but I can’t seem to connect to it. I think I set the config file correctly. PoorMan serves the same folder fine.
Two weeks after I started using Haiku almost daily, I still have problems with the names because I’m unfamiliar with them. I was going to suggest intuitive names as well, but then I thought:
Would I know what these programs do if I never heard of them?
Firefox
Opera
Chrome
Brave
Skype
GIMP
Kodi
VLC
And that’s just a tiny sample. So here I am, bumping a thread for this reply. The names are irrelevant. Once we get used to them, we’ll take them for granted just as we do with so many others.
[I’m on their side…]
The names are irrelevant. Once we get used to them, we’ll take them for granted just as we do with so many others.