Thinking up good application names?
 

Hi,

I'm rubbish at arty stuff. Tech stuff wahoo!

So as you may expect I have trouble thinking up names for application. Are there any good logical processes to go through?

Thanks!

Matt. I

Re: Thinking up good application names?
 

Yeah, I have the same problem. No luck so far. :(

Re: Thinking up good application names?
 

:( oh well..... any other suggestions?

Re: Thinking up good application names?
 

Think up a good application first? ;)

Short Answer: Take an obvious pun, or a play on the function of the product (Smart FTP, Hotmail, Gmail, etc...).
Long Answer: Take a three year course in marketing and research. XD

Re: Thinking up good application names?
 

Yes OK thanks.

The application bit is very cruical :) Yeh I'll give it a go (well maybe not the long one).

Thanks!

Re: Thinking up good application names?
 

Read a book that has some remote similarity to what your application does, use the title of the book. It helps if the book is a popular one, especially if you're going commercial with it.

If you're creating an application that calibrates a joystick everytime a game is started, then you could use Stephen King's "The Dead Zone" as a reference, and call your program Dead Zone. I don't think that would violate copyright laws.

Re: Thinking up good application names?
 

I have the same problem with names, but sometimes I get the great names for example I had to write a little piece of software that listens to your Network Interface Card and displays incoming and outgoing packets, IP Addresses, TTL etc. on the screen, so I was stuck at the name, and I was thinking one night (all night long) for a good name, first I ended up with a name in my own native language (Albanian) but I wanted to be in English, so I was thinking about how my software works and the software will read information from in and out of my NIC and it will display them politely and silently to the screen, so I ended up on the final name `SilentRead` because it will read all packets silently. Another software that I wrote sending news from Slashdot on my e-mail, first I named it as SlashRSS, but now I'm improving it to be Slashdot independent and to make more user-configurable on other RSS Feeds (not just Slashdot) and to send the contents from the RSS on the users' e-mail, so I ended up on a name `RSS Transporter`, because it will transport RSS contents to users' E-Mail.

So you can think this way to name your projects.

Re: Thinking up good application names?
 

spell it with more than the normal letters http://digg.com/
spell it with less than the normal letters http://flickr.com/
name it recursively gnu, lame, pine

Re: Thinking up good application names?
 

A friend of mine used to pick names of planets or stars that were somehow reminiscent of what the program did. That stopped when one of this clients, a proctologist, didn't see the humour.

Re: Thinking up good application names?
 

Or naming your software on animal names (like apple that uses wild cat names and there are 36 different wild cat species), or somebody can use fish species names, our actual example is Wireshark: http://www.wireshark.org/, but its not pure animal name, but it can be mixed up.