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When I first heard the name "Safari"

donmelton.com

350 points by ryannielsen 13 years ago · 179 comments

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SimHacker 13 years ago

At Maxis, we didn't arrive at the totally obvious name The Sims until very late in development.

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...

  • lifeisstillgood 13 years ago

    The perfect name reminds me of the Douglas Adams story somewhere in his third Hitchhiker book - about the Reason.

      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.
    • loceng 13 years ago

      Understanding allows for calm, energies from the unknown are able to be placed, to settle. Great little excerpt.

  • HornThisWay 13 years ago

    Were you going to call it "The Buds"? I don't think that's a very good name, but if I was high, I'd probably think it was perfect.

    • SimHacker 13 years ago

      By god, that very well might be it! I will have to test that theory be recreating the circumstances as accurately as possible. To science!!!

    • rmathew 13 years ago

      For the benefit of the non-native English speakers here or for those not too familiar with American culture, can you explain the awesomeness of this name?

      • gwillen 13 years ago

        "Bud" is an abbreviation of "buddy", an informal term for "friend."

        "Bud" is also a slang term for marijuana (which is made from the buds of the cannabis plant.)

    • heyitsnick 13 years ago

      I have no connection to this in any way. Yet i'm extremely confident that was exactly it.

  • acheron 13 years ago

    I seem to remember hearing it was going to be called "SimHouse" at one point.

    "Super Happy Friends Home" is excellent, but yeah, I think "The Sims" worked out for the best. :)

    • SimHacker 13 years ago

      Oh yeah, that sounds familiar! But that DEFINITELY was not the legendary name we all forgot. SimHouse and a few names like that were floated around, but they were't very exciting or apt, since the focus evolved from the architecture to the people.

      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...

      • idm 13 years ago

        Those design documents are fantastic. I love peering into the creative design process.

        • SimHacker 13 years ago

          It's interesting to look back over them and realize how many of those ideas we DIDN'T do! The hard but important part is cutting stuff that's not essential until you have something simple.

      • marshray 13 years ago

        SimCity 2000 was one of my favorite games ever. The Sims was novel and fun. But every Sim-themed game my family has bought since has just not held interest for more than a couple hours at best.

        Any thoughts on what happened to later Maxis games?

        • SimHacker 13 years ago

          First I'll describe why I think that SimCity was so successful, and The Sims was even more successful:

          Will gave a talk about designing user interface to simulation games back some time around '96, to Terry Winnograd's user interface design class at Stanford (at the time I worked with Terry at Interval Research), and I sat in on the class and took these notes:

          http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/WillWright.html

          He demonstrated an early version of The Sims, at the time called "Dollhouse", which he'd shown me an even earlier version of about a year before. At the time I was skeptical that he could get the AI to work, and I suggested he punt on the AI and just make an online multi player game. In retrospect, I sure was wrong!

          In the talk, he discussed why previous Maxis games were successful, and gave a demo of "Dollhouse," describing what he thought would be interesting about that game, which eventually became The Sims. The key to the AI was putting the intelligence in the objects, instead of in the characters, and making it possible to plug in new objects with their own content and programming, to expand the game on an open-ended way.

          The reason Will explained that SimCity was successful was that people already know a lot about the way cities work, so it's engaging, and it doesn't have to simulate details as much as just imply them, and let your imagination do the heavy lifting and colorful illustration. Computer games are much better at implicating than simulating, because any simulation is necessarily a vastly simplified caricature of reality, while your imagination is unlimited and has its own built-in "ai" and common sense knowledge base to draw on.

          There are two important models involved in a simulation game: the sparse digital model in the computer, which stays the same, and the rich organic model in your brain, which grows and changes as you play and explore the behavior and limitations of the game. As you play the game, the computer is downloading the details of an organic model into your brain, which elaborates them based on what you already know, and links them into your global understanding.

          It can be educational in that it makes you think about the issues you're dealing with, but you learn more by thinking about what you already know (and having your curiosity stimulated and being inspired to learn more), than it teaches you about what its simulation actually knows about. Instead of taking the simulation at face value as an accurate representation of reality, you explore and find the edges and limitations of the simulation, and compare them to reality. As you find the limitations of the game's model (in order to figure out how to take advantage of its limitations and cheat), you scoff at the game because you understand the world is much more complicated and nuanced than a computer game. But that's a good exercise to think about, and it stimulates you to discuss it with other people and learn more through other channels!

          That is one aspect of what Seymour Papert and Alan Kay refer to as "Constructionist education": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theor...

          Anyway, SimCity was successful because it was about a domain everybody knows a lot about. And The Sims was even more successful since it was even "closer to home", so to speak.

          But most people don't know much about plate tectonics, ant colonies, evolution or galactic conquest, so while SimEarth, SimAnt and Spore might teach you something about those topics and stimulate your curiosity, they weren't able to engage people and play off of their vast existing knowledge as much as SimCity and The Sims did.

          But independent of how engaging or commercially successful it was, I think Spore was a very interesting and successful experiment in several important aspects of game design, which had to be done.

          When Will described the early concept to me, of an online game with multiple levels that moved at different time scales, the first obvious problem I saw was that it would be impossible to coordinate the independent timelines in a massively multiplayer online game, since at each level, time moved at a different speed, so different players would be traveling through time at different rates, and it would be impossible for them to interact with each other in real time.

          But Spore solved that problem by being an "Massively Single Player Online Game", where players shared content asynchronously, but didn't directly interact together synchronously.

          I think the idea of sharing user created content asynchronously online is a great one, and Spore performed it very successfully.

          The other important concept that dovetails with that was tackling in-game content creation tools. And I think those were a wonderful success, and paved the way for other games to do similar things.

          With games like The Sims, it has some easy-to-use in-game tools for building architecture, but you have to go outside of the game and use tools like Photoshop to make skins, 3D Studio Max to make meshes, Character Studio and Biped to make animations, etc.

          We made some simplified tools for The Sims (like Transmogrifier) that let you make objects by exporting and importing bitmaps and editing them with 2D tools like Photoshop instead of requiring 3D tools like Max, which opened up content creation to a lot of people, but making 3D objects still remained a very tough problem, and we never released the tools we developed internally to do that, since they were very hard to use and had a lot of environmental dependencies (like requiring expensive commercial products).

          Building 3D editing tools into the game the way Spore did was very ambitious, and I think it worked extremely well. The user interface was very easy and fun to use in and of itself, and it gave players a huge amount of freedom to make everything from walking penises to hopping penises to flying penises to crawling penises, and even penis huts, penis houses, penis towers, penis planes, penis trains, and penis mobiles.

          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFOVYx90Ni8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv-NjbyhXFo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puv6pwG_AZo

          Spore had some great and successfully executed ideas about building and sharing user created content in it, but since it was an amalgam of several different games, and each sub-game was kind of like a tribute to an existing classic game, those games in themselves were not any better than the existing games, and they were not very well integrated.

          Here are some notes I took from Will's talk at GDC, which I had him review for accuracy at the time:

          http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/35

          You can compare it to what Spore actually delivered, and see the differences. There was a big gap between the ideal design as he articulated at that time, and what they were able to finally deliver. Of course that was inevitable, when working for a big company like EA, even with the freedom they gave him.

          There was an overall high concept that the stack of sub-games was a ladder you would climb to get to the higher level storytelling based game, and that you would then swoop down into the sub-games to perform scenes of the story. (The "T shaped game".) But the sub-games were never consequentially integrated enough for that to work. So I don't think the storytelling game was ever fully realized.

          That gap between the original design and the final product was of course because of the harsh constraints of reality and the necessity to ship something. They had to simplify it a lot, of course. And different people had ownership of each level, and the design decisions that one person would make at a lower level would spill over to the next levels as constraints and limitations they had to work within.

          I think the essential problem of how can each level consequentially effect the other levels in a way you can make a high level storytelling game around is a very hard one.

          The high level storytelling missions don't really require you to go back to the previous levels you climbed to get up to the galactic conquest level, and I have a hard time imagining how they could even do that. ("Go down to the protozoa level and conquer the evil amoeba who is about to sabotage the delicate diplomatic negotiations, by making the president throw up in the prime minister's lap!")

          • marshray 13 years ago

            What a great reply! Yes, we actually have gotten quite engaged with Spore.

            You should consider pasting this into a blog post or somewhere that's slightly less ephemeral than an HN thread.

  • bonobo 13 years ago

    > 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

    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.

    • SimHacker 13 years ago

      Why I never ... Uuuhh ... Hmmm ... It's hard to tell, you know. Well, maybe. Or maybe not. No way of telling, really. ;)

      • bonobo 13 years ago

        I think we will never know. Just in case, if you ever wake up in the middle of the night with that (supposedly) legendary name back in your mind, could you please tell us? :)

  • switz 13 years ago

    It's only 6 am, but this is my favorite story that I will read on the internet today. Thank you.

    • SimHacker 13 years ago

      Maxis is "Six AM" spelled backwards!

      • carlisle_ 13 years ago

        You are a god walking amongst mere mortals.

        • SimHacker 13 years ago

          Naw, I was just lucky to be hyperactive, and in the right place at the right time, plus I benefited from a lot of nice people who helped me get there.

          There are a lot of great people lurking around here, but the really godly ones don't have time to surf the internet! The thing you realize by meeting such people is that there is really no limit on how much you can learn and what you can do. And it's a lot easier now to pick new stuff up, what with the internets and all those tubes. Just keep improving yourself all the time, and keep yourself open to luck.

          And of course Will Wright has some great advice: Don't give up on your big dreams -- save and hone and cultivate them for later, when the time is right (and your skills and the technology have improved): "He encouraged designers with ideas for games that are far outside the box not to give up on those ideas, but instead to cultivate them and revisit them later, when the time, the team, and the technology might be right." http://www.gamespot.com/news/will-wright-wows-gdc-with-new-s...

  • neumann_alfred 13 years ago

    hen there was Will's quirky name, Super Happy Friends Home, which only the Japanese would love.

    ?

    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

augustl 13 years ago

I think many of you in the Hacker News crowd will recognize this problem that I'm yet to find a solution to myself:

    mkdir [blinking cursor]
Then 30 minutes passes and you didn't end up making that thing anyway since you got distracted while thinking up a name for it.
  • rurounijones 13 years ago

    As the famous, slightly modified from original, saying goes:

    "There are only two hard things in computer science. Cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors."

  • pistoriusp 13 years ago

    I always start with a codename. And for the longest time I've used the surnames of foreign scientists:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_scientists

  • mm_alex 13 years ago

    LittleBigPlanet, our PS3 game, was (is) called 'ps3test1'. the sequel, LBP2, is... also called ps3test1. that project really was our first attempt to bring up a devkit, probably with a rotating cube.

    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.

    • scrumper 13 years ago

      > 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.

  • peteretep 13 years ago

    I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: "How can CPAN help me with this problem?"

    Answer: http://search.cpan.org/search?query=Acme%3A%3AMetaSyntactic&...

  • FigBug 13 years ago

    I've gotten asked a lot where the name Miranda IM came from and I honestly have no idea. I was creating a new solution in Visual Studio and I needed a name. I remember it took under 10 minutes to come up with, I was browsing a bunch of name lists and I came across 'Miranda' and I thought that sure is a strange / unusual name, I'll use that. Turns out it's a fairly common name. I still think it's a good name for the product.

    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.

  • quarterto 13 years ago

    There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: Cache invalidation, and naming things.

  • devopstom 13 years ago

    I usually start projects on github, and allow the random name chooser to make that decision for me..

        "Great repository names are short and memorable. Need inspiration? How about drunken-nemesis."
  • debacle 13 years ago

    Good translate is your friend.

    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.

    • ufo 13 years ago

      As someone from Brazil, I wonder what kind of words would sound weird to an English speaker like that. I would have thought that most words would be recognizeable, given that English also has its fair share of Latin words.

      • debacle 13 years ago

        Portugese is far enough from Latin that many of the English cognates are not immediately recognizable.

        "Sangue bom," for example, is not visually translatable to English.

  • rooshdi 13 years ago

    I find just calling it app_number and moving on helps. I used to go in circles with names, until I realized how much time and sanity I was wasting. Spending more time on developing the product helps me understand it's core value better and, consequently, potential names to communicate that value effectively to new users.

  • roryokane 13 years ago

    I just give projects a plain, descriptive name, not worrying too much at first about using the exact, correct words. I have projects with names like “Boggle word list”, “cost matrix solver”, “def_init-initializer-type DRY enabler”, “Ghost Assistant”, and “recursive spiraling dots animation”. I don’t publish my projects until I’ve worked on them for a while, so I don’t mind if they’re not perfect at first.

  • barking 13 years ago

    I don't get to name many projects. But when I'm naming procedures I want the name to be self-documenting without being too long. Frequently I get exasperated and name it blah or sdfbdhfs!

  • jfoutz 13 years ago

    foo? bar? qux? metasyntacticvariable? potato?

    name it something. mv works if you need to change it.

    • VMG 13 years ago

      it also should be somewhat unique so that sed -ie can do its job

  • nemoto 13 years ago

    You could steal ideas from Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and several other Distro for giving codename to their release.

    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.

  • namank 13 years ago

    I have designated an in-prog folder and call it 'dev'. Everything in dev is strictly modifiable.

    • JasonFruit 13 years ago

      Working in a folder called dev feels wrong to me. It's like having a folder called 'bin' that is a trash bin.

yen223 13 years ago

Calling the browser 'Safari' is weird, if you think about it. I remember trying to teach my mom how to use the iPad to access the internet:

"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.

  • Someone 13 years ago

    Well, it fits with the theme. "Safari" is Swahili for "journey" or "trip" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari#Etymology)

    That fits it in with the browsers of the time:

      Netscape Navigator

  Internet Explorer
    I would guess the code name 'Alexander' came from 'Alexander the Great', who not only traveled a lot, but also conquered, just like Safari was aiming to conquer the Internet. They must have ignored the 'die young' aspect of that connotation.

    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.

    • lusr 13 years ago

      I was born in South Africa and have spent half my life in its neighbour, Namibia. Both countries are well known for diverse wildlife and vast unspoiled natural habitats.

      "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.

      • grecy 13 years ago

        I'm Australian, and that's what we think of the word "Walkabout".

        We roll our eyes at the tourists, then just go and do whatever it is we were doing.

    • smickie 13 years ago

      I always assumed, no ones mentioned it yet, that Safari was a link to the Mac OS X code names.

      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.

    • wzdd 13 years ago

      Well, Safari used KHTML, and the big KHTML-based browser at the time was called Konqueror...

    • donmelton 13 years ago

      I'll write another post about why we called it "Alexander." You're not far from the mark about it being related to "Alexander the Great." But not for the reason you think.

      • gioele 13 years ago

        Given that Safari/WebKit is based on KHTML, I'd say that Alexander was named after KDE's Konqueror.

        • donmelton 13 years ago

          Yes, that is the relationship. All of the components were named after (K)conquerors.

    • bgarbiak 13 years ago

      Well, I can't see how "killing elephants" is different than "exploiting the natives; killing rare animals". Safari is phonetically a very nice name, however it still bears negative connotations. At least for some people.

      • dirtyaura 13 years ago

        Great names often have some negative connotations.

        Caterpillar is such an excellent name, that almost everybody remembers it once they have seen it. That can't be said about many other building machinery brands. But you can bet that when that name was proposed, somebody raised objections because "you can't name our powerful machines after an insect"

        Virgin Airlines has very negative connotations ("Virgin communicates that we are inexperienced and not safe to fly, and that's a show-stopper in airline industry, Mr. Branson. shouldn't we consider another brand for our airline subsidiary?")

        It takes balls to pick a great brand name, because almost all names have minus sides.

        • kamjam 13 years ago

          Just an FYI, you do know that the Virgin Group has been around a lot longer than the airline company right?

          The brand name "Virgin" arose when Branson and a partner were starting their first business, a record shop. They considered themselves virgins in business.

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Group

          It is a very British story so most of us in the UK probably know the success story a lot better.

          • dirtyaura 13 years ago

            Yes. I've read a couple of books by Sir Branson. Virgin Airlines was used by Igor Branding agency in their naming guide of something that somebody might object even if Virgin prefix is an obvious choice for any Branson's company

            • kamjam 13 years ago

              Yes, I totally get your point. A bit of a double edged sword really!

        • philwelch 13 years ago

          Another example: "iPad".

          • bitwize 13 years ago

            "Wii".

            Oh, how the jokes flowed when the name was announced. Then the sales numbers came out, and people stopped joking.

            • nuclear_eclipse 13 years ago

              Some of us still didn't stop. A bad name is a bad name, regardless of how good the product might be.

              • pbhjpbhj 13 years ago

                In part the "bad" name helped to spread the word of the product initially; it was a hook for many stories that would otherwise not have been written IMO. Thousands of media outlets poked fun at it all the while informing the world about a revolutionary new Nintendo system.

                Genius.

    • baddox 13 years ago

      But it doesn't fit grammatically with Navigator and Explorer, which both either describe the browser or its user directly. The piece of software directly lets the user navigate and explore the web. Safari's name doesn't do this.

    • SimHacker 13 years ago

      What hasn't anyone developed a browser, and just called it "Browser"?

    • pretoriusB 13 years ago

      Well, the progression should be:

      Navigator -> Explorer -> Konqueror

      With the order the arrive at a new found / colonized land.

      And then you just go there for Safari.

  • zephjc 13 years ago

    I don't know - when I first heard the name, 'Safari' made sense to me after a moment of thinking about it. Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, and Safari - all named around the theme of discovery.

  • rmk2 13 years ago

    > "But I don't want to see animals"

    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. ;)

  • city41 13 years ago

    I've always felt Microsoft has been very good at grabbing very generic, "standard" names: Word, Office, Windows, Internet Explorer, etc. These names become very iconic in and of themselves and they just "feel" like the market leader, whether you are familiar with them or not.

  • namank 13 years ago

    Do it again and see the reaction now.

    Safari is not for one time use.

  • sbmassey 13 years ago

    I vaguely associated it with "Surfin' Safari" and the Beach Boys.

  • vacri 13 years ago

    I really wish that MS didn't also name their file manager 'Explorer'. "Okay, now open Explorer... no, not Internet Explorer..."

bdcravens 13 years ago

“Please don’t let us name the browser after a feminine hygiene product!”

Ironic that this was a concern, given the later iPad

mmariani 13 years ago

Great story. It shows that doesn't matter if you are Apple or a solo developer, product naming is hard. Actually, as the OP, I find coding easier. Nevertheless, we can't ship products with placeholder names. I have a little brainstorming process that goes like this:

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?

  • henrikschroder 13 years ago

    Ours is pretty much like that, with one more step: Google each candidate name. Those that get few hits or hits that are completely unrelated to the problem domain get a +1.

McP 13 years ago

It was a poor choice of name in that it gives no hint as to what the application might actually do.

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.

  • eridius 13 years ago

    And "Firefox" and "Chrome" are sensible names?

    • habitue 13 years ago

      Ah, now "Internet Explorer" there's a name! What does it do? Explores the Internet of course!

      • eridius 13 years ago

        I still have a fondness for the name "Netscape Navigator". It seems a shame that we never started using the term "netscape" to refer to the internet.

        • pavel_lishin 13 years ago

          I'm so used to Netscape being a brand name, it took me at least ten seconds to break the word up into its constituent words, and understand what you meant.

        • kragen 13 years ago

          There were people who did ("You can see my new page on netscape!") but maybe not in the way you're thinking. At the time (1994) we all called the browser "Netscape", once we got used to not calling it "Mozilla".

jballanc 13 years ago

Just for some perspective, in my time at Apple "It doesn't suck" was usually the highest form of praise possible.

  • nicholassmith 13 years ago

    I've read that a few times in places, which is interesting on the face of it as in public the language surrounding Apple products is hyperbolic and overwhelmingly positive, and internally saying "well, it doesn't suck" is high praise. The duality of company presences.

  • lloeki 13 years ago

    "All [names] suck. This one just sucks less" [0]

    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

bengoodger 13 years ago

Product naming can be ridiculously hard. Even if you have something you personally think is clever, everyone else can think you're a dork.

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.

  • nacker 13 years ago

    I had been a Phoenix user for several months when I heard it had run into problems with the name. When I heard it was going to be called Firefox, I thought it was the most ridiculous name I'd ever heard! Funny, now I really like it.

    When I first heard the name Barack, though... http://rense.com/general84/brck.htm

jpxxx 13 years ago

The weird thing about Safari is that it's simultaneously a niche irrelevance on a minor computing platform, a groundbreaking web browser of major historical import, and the public face of the most important wad of code in play on Earth today.

benzor 13 years ago

I've always felt that picking a solid name is one of those things that will never happen while I'm thinking about it intently. Glad to hear it's the same for the big boys too...

Syssiphus 13 years ago

IBrowse would have been a bad choice. There is an Amiga OS Browser which goes by that name, and it is a little bit older than Safari.

http://www.ibrowse-dev.net/

philbo 13 years ago

This bit surprised me somewhat:

'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?

  • bdash 13 years ago

    Resources such as nib files and help files aren't amenable to things like #defines. Filenames and build system metadata fall in to the same cateogry. The source code proper is a different story, but is also trivially updateable via sed or the like.

  • bni 13 years ago

    What makes you think it was string literals? Probably a lot of classes was prefixed with "Alex" or something similar. Folks at Apple, being perfectionists, of course could not live with the code name all over the source :-)

JGuo 13 years ago

Not sure of the actual origin, but it seems to me that Safari is a reference to "journey", and works with the OS X naming after big cats. Then again it could just make sense in hindsight.

brudgers 13 years ago

Based on no evidence whatsoever, just an intuition about Jobs, I would not be surprised if the point of reference was Surfin' Safari - the Beach Boys song.

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.

  • icodestuff 13 years ago

    I always assumed that was it. Ironically, I haven't heard anyone say "surfing the web" since Safari came out.

msgilligan 13 years ago

I remember when Safari was very buggy in its early versions and some folks within Apple had taken to calling it "So Sorry". I had several bug reports on a web app my company had developed for Apple that turned out to be Safari bugs. They were fixed rather rapidly, which is what would finally convince my contacts that it definitely wasn't a bug in our web app. "So Sorry" they said...

bluesmoon 13 years ago

I always thought it came from the Hindi word Safari, which translates to Traveller or Explorer (Safar is a Journey).

I personally codename my projects pffft.

xsace 13 years ago

free-DOM, it's actually a clever name

melvinmt 13 years ago

But why is the icon a compass though?

  • gurkendoktor 13 years ago

    I actually think it makes the name work. It'd feel a little childish if the browser was called Safari and the icon would show a jeep or binoculars.

  • arrrg 13 years ago

    Because you use it to navigate, also on Safaris?

    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”.

  • terhechte 13 years ago

    When you're on a safari in amazonas, that's what you need in order to find your way (well, nowadays a GPS might do wonders, but when the name safari was historically established, there was no gps)

    • groby_b 13 years ago

      Trust me, when you're out in the boondocks, you still want a compass. Sure, GPS is great. Until you can't find a satellite, or it runs out of batteries, or a gazillion other things that can go wrong with electronics in the wilderness.

  • chris_wot 13 years ago

    Where do you want to go today?

ksec 13 years ago

The name Safari is still one of those mystery to me, I like the name, and my guess it properly came from the idea of Navigation -> Compass - > Safari. Although i was expecting a post to truly reveal the mystery behind the reason for such a name.

  • georgeg 13 years ago

    Safari is a swahili name(Swahili is spoken by people of the East-coast of Africa). It means a journey or an adventure. It could also mean a great undertaking. Steve must have known this from his many journeys.:)

    • opinali 13 years ago

      I also suspect that this name came from some snark from Jobs against the web. If the browser is Safari, then logically, the WWW is a wild jungle. Even more relevant today, as Apple champions the idea of walled gardens in opposition to open application platforms.

marijn 13 years ago

I always assumed it was a reference to "Surfin' Safari", the Beach Boys song. Maybe not.

hughw 13 years ago

Oh the irony, that Safari on my MBP has a rendering bug, probably acceleration related, that truncates the text in the sixth paragraph.

stuaxo 13 years ago

"We could ship a browser in a year" he missed the second part "thanks to work done on kHTML which we based it on"

  • Someone 13 years ago

    I would think it is more 'did not feel fitting for this story' than 'missed'. He isn't mentioning any other parts they built on either (Cocoa, the Mac OS Unix-based networking code, the font designers for Mac OS system fonts, the GNU project for gcc, K&R's progamming language design, etc)

    • kragen 13 years ago

      Shipping a browser in a year, starting with a browser, is less impressive than shipping a browser in a year starting from a GUI toolkit.

      (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.)

  • lgg 13 years ago

    In the context of the story that is irrelevant, and it is actually not correct. Don Melton started at Apple in the summer of 2001 (the same day I did). At the time of this story they had already been working on Safari for over a year, the point was that in that meeting they realized that Alexander was less than an additional 6 months away from shipping.

    Not to discount the work of the kHTML guys, but it was more than a year of work to get from kHTML to Webkit.

RaSoJo 13 years ago

Ancient powerful or mythical cities here. ElDorado, Hamunaptra, Babylon, etc.

emehrkay 13 years ago

I feel like I am pretty good at naming things (I dont think about it for too long, if that matters).

Describe to me a product and I'll name it for you.

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