Consider different names

[ryanprior]

It's reasonable to assume that a user has their friends in their contacts, and Friends is a nice cheery name for a contacts app! Still, I'm concerned about using it as the default name for contacts on your operating system: users also have their abuser or parole officer as contacts. Selecting "Friends" as the first step in contacting that person might be jarring.

Alternatives

I feel obliged to brainstorm alternatives, although I doubt I can do any better than y'all would :smile:

category	ideas
Familiar :sunglasses:	Mortals, Folks, Herd, Community
Professional :tipping_hand_person:	Society, Associates, Cohorts, Register, Rolodex
Abstract :book:	Humans, People, Circles, and the obvious: Contacts

Prerequisites

• [x] I have searched open and closed issues for duplicates.

[cassidyjames]

One thing we've talked about for the purpose of Friends is making it a bit more of an opinionated design than a generic contacts app. The idea is to default to only showing “starred” or “ favorite” contacts, avoiding having to dig through the massive contact list of everyone you've ever emailed or called. So in that sense, Contacts might actually be counterintuitive since it won't work exactly how folks might expect a contacts app to work.

That said, I'm open to other names. For a while, Android used “People” as their app name, but they've reverted back to Contacts as well.

[ryanprior]

The Android case is interesting. They are localizing in a ton of language, which we want to as well. "People" might be more difficult to localize than "Contacts." It might also sound funny if you're going to look up the contact info for an automated booking line or whatever, but no scenario comes to mind where it would be jarring.

The current name does pair well in the abstract with a design like you're describing where it only shows contacts you've explicitly marked as friendly, but since other platforms have trained users to expect that a contacts app has all contacts in it, they might not grasp that aspect.

Maybe "Friends" is a view within the app, and a dock menu option which jumps to that view?

[electricduck]

Since we're going down that rabbit-hole, I imagine part of the reason Android going back to "Contacts" is because sometimes some users also keep contacts other than people: I also have businesses, automated machines, landlines, and other numbers/emails that don't belong to a single "person" (or anyone at all). I also favourite a lot of those entries too. That being said, I really have no idea how often people save and/or properly sort non-people contacts.

Personally, I am not that I'm nitpicky about such things — I've survived this long with Microsoft calling theirs "People" for almost a decade now — and I actually quite like the name "Friends". 10 points for a throwing out "Rolodex" as a potential name though, @ryanprior!

[cassidyjames]

Ha, re: Rolodex, the predecessor of this app was actually called "Dexter" as a nod to rolodex. But that comes from a time when we were making apps for Ubuntu and wanted unique, distinctive names like "Postler"; these days, first-party apps on elementary OS should be named in a more straightforward manner like "Mail" and "Tasks".

[hanaral]

I think 'people' is easier to translate (not every language has a word that has the same level of ambiguity as 'friends') and has a similar level of friendliness

[davidak]

first-party apps on elementary OS should be named in a more straightforward manner like "Mail" and "Tasks".

then "Contacts" would be the most straightforward name for a contacts app, if it should be one

i'm not sure how useful a contacts app is just for your friends. i also contact my mother, doctor, therapist, car mechanic or boss... and i think elementary OS is also intended for work and not only for personal use? so i would only have work contacts on my work computer

[Eldhrimer]

I would like to add as a suggestion "Address Book", since I think it is in concept similar to Rolodex while being much more easily translatable, it provides a more generalized and physical metaphor and it's different enough from "Contacts" that people going in may not expect it to function as the Contact app they could have on their phones. It is also generic and straightforward like the rest of first party apps.

Furthermore, Address Book fits better for the purpose of referencing someone details, be it phone and mobile numbers, email and physical addresses (we could even provide a map in app similar to the one found in Calendar", and so on.

[hanaral]

@Eldhrimer I'm all for more translatability but address book possibly would need actual localisation. As it's uncommon to have multiple words acting as one noun in a lot of (particularly agglutinative) languages, it potentially forces higher effort translations for the better.

[Eldhrimer]

@hanaral While I understand your point, the way I see it is that address books have existed in almost every country in one way of another; so while it may not be easy to literally translate, analogies or equivalents would likely be found in most languages, and since people use to use them a lot decades ago it will most likely have a easier-on-the-ears name. e.g.: In Spanish a literal translation would be "Libreta de direcciones" which is long enough to be a poor name for an app, but at the same time, address books would normally be called "Agendas" or "Directorios" which are short and generic enough.