Kevin Daly

On the surprising difficulty of naming applications

This is a follow-up to the previous post.

As I was walking down the street this afternoon (not going anywhere in particular, just staying outside because it was too hot to be inside) I decided on yet another name change for my soon-to-be-released new application. The working version I've been using is simply the initials of the name of the first version, with “2” on the end. That was always uninspiring, but I was at a loss what else to call it. A number of times I'd think of a name or someone would suggest one and I'd think “Yep, that'll do”...then I'd invariably get sick of it after a while. Then I tried thinking up imaginative nonsense names derived from various permutations on the word “blog” combined with elements denoting smallness, multiplicity and so on, but as soon as I'd find a likely candidate I'd hit Google and find that it was either already taken for something very similar, or happened to be exactly the same as the Czech for “Person who is excessively intimate with cabbages and sometimes, beetroot”. You know, that sort of thing.

Then it struck me: I really hate the pseudo-word blog, and avoiding it in my new app name will therefore be a liberating experience. Or something. That helped.

But all of this has caused me to have renewed understanding and sympathy for, of all people, marketing types and those who associate with them. Since I'm having such trouble coming up with a suitable label for a free piece of fluff, I have to admit that describing and placing actual commercial products looks hard. This is probably why people are given money to do it. Well, that and the fact that cocaine doesn't pay for itself...(that was a joke. So just relax, OK?)
I have renewed sympathy for certain former employers and colleagues with whom I have in the past energetically (but not inappropriately) debated the wisdom of particular  marketing choices:
I forgive them for “Fido”.
I even forgive them for the water-soluble umbrellas (and in fairness, nobody knew they were water-soluble. At least until it rained).

Right, that should be enough humility for 2005

My contribution to Pocket PC blogging moves forward

I've spent the last few days putting some of the finishing touches on the upgrade to my Pocket PC blogging application, which adds support for multiple blogs using various blogging engines (and categories, except that they still don't work with dotnetjunkies...I'm pretty confident that they will once DNJ switches over to CommunityServer).
Last things to do are to add one more blog engine, implement a desktop setup job, write a ReadMe file and of course do some more testing.

Once that's done I intend to update the original single-blog Pocket Blog Writer so that it supports categories and will work with CommunityServer::Blogs when that goes RTM (for various reasons the original version would not have...). The other improvements I will back-port to the original version are the ability to update the post you have just sent (the app switches to update mode immediately after a successful new post) and saving an unsent post as a 'draft' when you shut down the application and automatically retrieving it next time you start it up. 
I think that version will still be the best choice for people who only have one .Text or CS::Blogs  blog, from the point of view of code size, complexity and avoiding unnecessary execution paths (no point in checking for something that will never be there).

But if you have multiple blogs or you use Blogger, Blogsphere, DasBlog and certain others (I'll provide the full list later) then you may find my new masterwork (or as some might have it, appalling kludged together piece of garbage) of interest.