At first there was the secret development name, Project X, but everybody had a Project X, and we certainly couldn't ship with that.
Then there was Jamie's obvious name, Dollhouse, which was quite descriptive, but boys would hate it.
Then there was Will's quirky name, Super Happy Friends Home, which only the Japanese would love.
Then there was Jim's high minded name, Jefferson, for the pursuit of happiness, but it made everybody think of the sitcom The Jeffersons.
Then there was the legendary perfectly descriptive catchy epic name, that everyone on the team really loved, which we dreamed up together in a brainstorming session when we were all quite stoned, but by the next day we all forgot it, and nobody could ever remember what it was again, although we could all distinctly remember the warm glow of knowing that it was the best possible name in the world, which everyone would love. Those were good times! ;)
But for some reason, during all that time, despite racking our brains, nobody ever though of "The Sims", which is retrospect was a totally obvious name for a continuation of the SimCity franchise focusing on the people in the city. (The original SimCity manual referred to the people in the city as "the Sims," so there was a long standing precedent.)
I have no idea who eventually came up with the name The Sims, and I'm happy with it, but it definitely wasn't the perfect name that everybody forgot. It's lost in the sands of time...
And sometimes, after some of the worst of these outrages,
the Dwellers in the Forest would send a Messenger to
either the Leader of the Princes of the Plains or the
Leader of the Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides and demand
to know the reason for this intolerable behavior.
And the Leader, whichever one it was, would take the
Messenger aside and explain the reason to him, slowly and
carefully, and with great attention to the considerable
detail involved.
And the terrible thing was, it was a very good one. It was
very clear, very rational and tough. The Messenger would
hang his head and feel sad and foolish that he had not
realized what a tough and complex place the real world
was, and what difficulties and paradoxes had to be
embraced if one was to live in it.
"Now do you understand?" the Leader would say.
The Messenger would nod dumbly.
"And you see these battles have to take place?"
Another dumb nod.
"And why they have to take place in the Forest, and why it
is in everybody's best interest. the Forest Dwellers
included, that they should?"
"Er ..."
"In the long run."
"Er, yes."
And the Messenger did understand the reason, and he
returned to his people in the Forest. But as he approached
them, as he walked through the Forest and among the trees,
he found that all he could remember of the reason was how
terribly clear the argument had seemed. What it actually
was, he couldn't remember at all.
And this, of course, was a great comfort when next the
Tribesmen and the Princes came hacking and burning their
way through the Forest, killing every Forest Dweller in
their way."Super Happy Friends Home" is excellent, but yeah, I think "The Sims" worked out for the best. :)
The big problem was that nobody had any idea what players would think of it, so we just kept developing it and playing it and changing the design, while wondering about what it was all about.
There was one terrible phase we went through, trying to frame it like a simulated situation comedy, complete with a laugh track. That resulted in the first characters being named Edith and Archie (and I named the visual programming tool "Edith" for Edit House).
But fortunately the idea of simulating a TV show was eventually flushed down the toilet. It just took a few weeks to walk all the way to the bathroom. ;(
I was rooting for a weird name like "Perky Pat Layouts", based on Philip K Dick's book, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which had an uncanny creepy plot about adults on drugs playing together with physical miniaturized doll houses in order to enter a shared virtual reality. http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?bnum=577 http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsN... But EA didn't like the idea of selling CAN-D...
I've put up some old design documents here: http://www.scribd.com/collections/4050497/The-Sims
This "Happy Friends Home" initial proposal from October 2 1996 is pretty funny, and captures the essence: http://www.scribd.com/doc/117483854/The-Sims-Happy-Friends-H...
Have you considered it only seemed legendary because you were all stoned? When I'm drunk every idea seems a good idea...
I wonder if the name would still seem legendary if you guys had remembered it.
?
I just saw a talk by him yesterday where he confirmed what you can read (and see) here, http://www.will-wright.com/willshistory7.php
Not that it has anything to do with your point, but still :P
mkdir [blinking cursor]
"There are only two hard things in computer science. Cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors."
Ever since then I've been a codename fan. I go for liquor names (since I work at home across from the booze shelf)- I'm currently building Frangelico.
the project, and compiled output, on every platform, is called 'pc.elf' (or .vcproj or .exe or whatever) SIGH
there's an inverse correlation between awesome-ness of directory name and chance-of-shipping, in my experience.
Sackboy's law? It's absolutely true.
Thanks for sharing that about LBP: it's great to hear that my nominative inertia is shared by such high company.
Answer: http://search.cpan.org/search?query=Acme%3A%3AMetaSyntactic&...
I remember when I was working on ACDSee, the original author said, "If I knew it was going to become popular, I would have picked a better name." The company originally made catalog software, and a Co-op student made ACDSee as a side project. It's sustained the company for almost 20 years.
"Great repository names are short and memorable. Need inspiration? How about drunken-nemesis."Pick a language you don't know, and have at it:
"picture site" => "irudi_gune" (basque)
I find that Basque, Portuguese, and Welsh produce very good names.
name it something. mv works if you need to change it.
For example, in Debian, they take a character name in Toy Story for their codename. In Ubuntu, they take an animal name in alphabetical order.
"First press the home button"
"Ok"
"Now tap on Safari"
"But I don't want to see animals"
"..."
And that's when I realized why Internet Explorer was so successful.
That fits it in with the browsers of the time:
Netscape Navigator
Internet Explorer
Safari also has the right feelings associated with it with almost everybody. Some will think "hah, killing elephants", others will think "paying people to help me watch elephants, so that they no longer need or want to kill them", but nobody (nowadays) will associate negative thoughts (exploiting the natives; killing rare animals) with it. And, apparently, there also is a link with surfing the ocean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfin_Safari. I think that may have led to thinking of the name, but I doubt that is strong enough to choose the name.
"Safari", to me, is a word foreigners use unnecessarily and some locals chuckle at when they hear it. Locals simply say "We're going to Blahblah National Park for Christmas." It's also the name for a brand of dried fruits and nuts, which makes it even weirder to hear it in conversation here.
I honestly didn't grasp the relevance of the name to the Internet until you explained it now, despite programming for over 15 years and living in Africa for over 29 years.
You'd go on Safari to observe (not necessarily hunt) wild cats like Tigers, Lions, etc.
Also along with the binoculars for remote desktop, I thought they'd be going for a Safari theme throughout the OS, but it ended up going more space themed.
I guess you could say the OS (both Safari and space) fall into the exploration theme as a whole.
Navigator -> Explorer -> Konqueror
With the order the arrive at a new found / colonized land.
And then you just go there for Safari.
If we do not count the typical geek crowd (HN, /. etc.), then I am pretty sure most people go online to do exactly that: go on a safari, see animals (baby animals! cats! cats! dogs! cats!), babies, and Facebook is sort of a safari, allowing you to observe your online friends in their natural habitat. ;)
Safari is not for one time use.
Ironic that this was a concern, given the later iPad
1) List the name of all competitors that made into the business plan; // this is important mainly to avoid problems
2) List of nouns that evoke a basic understanding of the root problem the program tries to solve; // I know it's obvious, but finding a name right here create an instant connection with your target users
3) List all the features that make the program stand out; // Again it's obvious, yet this is a great source of names
4) Mix and match all these these words, throw them into a bucket, and sleep on it for a while;
5) Usually, after some days have passed I come back, and weed out the crapy ones; // and...
6) Work a little more on the rest with a dictionary, if needed go back to 3;
7) Finally, when I have a short list of good names I try to find domain names;
8) mkdir <project_name> // or mv <old> <new> :)
How do you go about your process?
While on holiday and in need of some internet, a (highly intelligent) friend searched around the local town and could only found a Mac in a hotel lobby. Despite being very motivated she was unable to persuade it to open a browser and eventually gave up and was left wondering how Macs could possibly be described as intuitive or user friendly.
I guess at some point one intellectually reaches a no-return state where due to some Dunning-Kruger corollary you find everything you do sucks to various degrees.
It follows that "it's brilliant" is much less impacting than "it doesn't suck" since the former, while authentic, may feel shallower in the reasoning that led to it.
[0]: http://www.mutt.org
Related anecdotes:
When trying to come up with a name for Firefox (after having two other names rejected due to trademark snafus), a friend of mine sarcastically rattled off a bunch of alternatives using the same prefix as the outgoing "Firebird" on IRC one night. I think it was "Firecrap, Fireturd, Firefox". I stopped him. The consonance was great, and the team loved the name. The rest is history.
At the beginning of Chrome, we had to come up with a project name. Inspired how Netscape did their project naming, we did a vote. The results were truly awful. I think "Goose" was the winner. At this point Linus came in and put us out of our misery, "How about Chrome... it's kind of ironic given the UI design." Everyone agreed that it was much better. That was before we'd written really any code, so it stuck for the entire project. Shortly before launch the marketing folk did a brief exploration, but we threw up all over their suggestions, and Chrome stuck.
When I first heard the name Barack, though... http://rense.com/general84/brck.htm
'Not only had we gotten very used to calling it that, the string “Alexander” was all over the code and buried in its resources. So the engineering team wasn’t just curious about the real name, they were worried about correctly and completely changing the placeholder name at the last minute.'
Why would you litter a codebase with disparate string literals referring to a "placeholder name" rather than using a single resource file or a single #define?
It is free from the negative connotations of a reference to Africa and consistent with the sort of Californian to which Jobs aspired. Apple was funded by a VW microbus after all.
The play on surfing is consistent with Apple's image of how consumers should be oriented to use their products.
I personally codename my projects pffft.
[1]http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&s...
That’s one of those things that make perfect sense to me. I’m mystified in what respect that would not be a fitting icon. It’s certainly better than an “e”.
(To be fair, Mozilla shipped a browser in a few months after founding, and Konqueror didn't work well enough for me to use it as my primary browser at the time that the Safari guys took it. And, as the other comment pointed out, it actually took the Safari guys a couple of years.)
Not to discount the work of the kHTML guys, but it was more than a year of work to get from kHTML to Webkit.
Describe to me a product and I'll name it for you.