It’s fascinating to me how people use names. For instance, I frequently see people refer to an Apple computer as a MAC. Every letter capitalized. At first, I give them the benefit of a doubt. That maybe they’re emphasizing the word to ensure that I understand exactly what type of computers they are referring to. Nope. A sentence later, I see MAC again, instead of Mac. Maybe a few more times after that. Apple uses Mac everywhere, never MAC. Yet, some people still type out MAC in all caps, as if it were an acronym instead of an abbreviation of Macintosh.

I’ve seen the same thing with Adobe Flex, now Apache Flex. Some people always type out FLEX, capitalizing every letter. Adobe and Apache both call it Flex, with only the F capitalized.

Fun side note. Adobe AIR was once called Adobe Integrated Runtime, yet I haven’t seen Adobe call it that for years.

A colleague once challenged me to find a page on Adobe’s website that actually refers to the name, Adobe Integrated Runtime. Other than some very, very old references on Adobe Labs from when the runtime was still alpha/beta and the name wasn’t finalized yet, I couldn’t find it. Those Labs pages are so old, that they don’t really count.

Oddly, Adobe still capitalizes the name AIR. In this particular case, using all caps is valid, and yet there’s basically no official indication for why it’s like that if someone new to AIR were to go looking for it. At best, Wikipedia is probably the most authoritative place that spells out Adobe Integrated Runtime.

My project, Feathers has a similar thing happening with its name. Some people call it FeathersUI. I have never called it that. The domain name does have “ui” in it, admittedly, because that’s the best one I could find. However, some people called it FeathersUI before that, which is fascinating because it basically came out of nowhere. Yes, it’s a UI library, but when the library’s author doesn’t call it that, where does one get the idea to add a little something extra on their own? Now, obviously, I understand that you might want to add a bit of context for people who are first encountering the project. I often say “Feathers UI components” or something like that when I feel that it’s helpful. But that’s different than making it a part of the name. Now, some library names might look nice with camel case naming, but man, FeathersUI just doesn’t look aesthetically pleasing. At least put a space in there. Blech!

Anyway, I’m not trying to criticize or make fun of anyone. In all seriousness, I’m completely fascinated how each person in the world bends language to his or her own desires, and I think that’s awesome. Sometimes I don’t understand why, but that’s part of the charm. The MAC and FLEX thing have always fascinated me, and I’ve always liked pointing it out and asking people, “have you noticed this?” and “I wonder why?” Now that it’s happened to something that I created, the observation has been just screaming to get out. So, if you’ve called it FeathersUI, instead of Feathers like I do, why? Did you read it from someone else? Did it just seem right to you, and you didn’t think to confirm it? Will you continue calling it that just to spite me? 😉