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I’ve been twitting about it for a few weeks: I’ve decided to give a new name to the upcoming Kosmos v3.

First to explain my reasons for the renaming. Let me go back to end of 2007 (huh, was it so long ago?) when I started working on a new pet project: a desktop mapping application. Back then I noticed most of the cool stuff related to OpenStreetMap had to contain “osm” in its name, so I searched for words containing “osm” on the net. I’m not mentioning other candidates, but I settled on more exotic version of “cosmos”, to improve searchability.

Well, it turns out some other people thought the same, so now we have all sorts of stuff also called Kosmos: Russian rockets, some new-age journal, a Greek car rental agency, an oil company and I don’t know what else. So when you want to find Kosmos on Google, it typically turns up on the bottom of the first results page. Which is kind of uncool

The second reason for renaming is the fact that Kosmos name had not really have to do anything with the actual purpose of the application.

So a month ago I started toying with the renaming idea. Since I wasn’t too sure if it was a good idea at all, I decided I’d stay with the old name if I couldn’t find more catchy and unique one. I have to say it was a hard search: I have a few dozen name candidates listed in my private Wiki (I’m not revealing any of these to avoid causing distress to readers) – but most of these are either a) already used for other stuff or b) just plain ugly. (As a sidenote: my friend Boris (jokingly I hope) suggested a name that would put my blog squarely in the internet XXX territory. Let’s just say it related the mapping with some human private parts, I won’t go into details on this one).

And The Name Is…

OK, I won’t bore you to death: the name I chose is Maperitive. Let me retype this without any spelling errors: Maperitive. But what does it mean, you might ask? Well, it’s a pun: a map and an apéritif. So to paraphrase a Web dictionary: it’s stimulating the appetite for mapping.

I’m not sure you’ll like the name. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure I like the name that much myself – but it’s better than the other candidates. It’s not revolutionary like iPad or MS Paint. But what I especially like about it is that at the time of me writing this post, it has an absolute zero search results on Google. So Maperitive it is. No going back.

Other News

Other than name-searching, I did a fair amount of work on the actual application, mostly on the parsing of rendering rules and the graphics. I’ll cover this in another post this weekend, but right now I’m finishing this post to go search for a good algorithm for calculating the area of a polygon on Earth surface. Next time I’ll tell you why…