Question

What is a generic term for the button/icon from which programs are launched or indicated by?

• In Windows, we have the taskbar, on which each top level window (XP/Vista) or application (7+) has a taskbar button.

• In Mac OS X, we have the dock, on which each application has a dock icon.

• In recent versions of Ubuntu, we have the launcher(?), on which each application has a launcher icon(?).

I don’t know what other Linux desktops call things and how much Gnome and KDE can each differ.

Anyways, what is the generic term to refer to a taskbar button/dock icon/launcher icon? I am designing an API to abstract jump lists and dock menus / dock tile plugins and I was wondering how I can generically refer to each of the platform-specific application launching mechanisms with a general term.

I don’t think setPlatformSpecificApplicationLaunchingMechanismMenu or setJumpListOrDockMenuOrDockTilePluginOrUbuntuThingMenu would be very good names. 🙂

Realistically, setApplicationMenu? setDesktopMenu?

EDIT: Apparently Taskbar is a generic term.

Answer 1

Anyways, what is the generic term to refer to a taskbar button/dock icon/launcher icon?

Sounds like an application icon to me. Application icons may appear in a number of places, but at no matter where they are, these are icons that represent their respective applications.

I don’t think there’s anything more specific… or more generic (icon?)… than that.