The Telepathic Desktop: Apps Are Out, People Are In

“I guess it is not a big secret that I am a strong advocate of
task-based approaches when it comes to using computers. I
don’t care what my web browser or my text editor are called,
but I do care a lot about browsing the web and editing text files.
In the GNOME menu, the Gedit text editor appears as “Text editor”,
and at least in the past, the Epiphany web browser appeared as “Web
browser”. On Ubuntu, it seems to appear as “Epiphany web browser”,
probably because it is not the default browser in Ubuntu.

“GNOME apps in general are quite well behaved in this respect. I
do not like selfish applications which make a big noise about their
own excellence. In fact I don’t even want to know they exist.
What I am interested in is the document I am working on, not the
software. Selfish apps distract users in two ways: branding and
design. By renaming Slashdot to “Slashdot – Mozilla Firefox”,
Mozilla does get a point across, as well as with trying to make the
user use Firefox as much as possible. The point being, “look at
this awesome application! we are mozilla! you are user!””

Complete
Story