From Salad to Aviary: How I Named Three Apps and Lost My Mind

Writing the code took weeks. Finding names nobody else had taken took longer.

Every developer knows the stages of building an app. First there's the idea. Then the code. Then the glorious moment when it works. And then, just when you think you're nearly done, a quiet voice asks: "So… what's it called?"

This is the story of how I gave one app four names, almost shipped a salad, and ended up with an aviary. Names, trademark registers and dead domains were involved. A German insult was involved. A kanban board was nearly named after an onion.

Act 1: Humble beginnings (a.k.a. "Project:Alias")

I'm a product designer, not an engineer. A while back I started building a Mac app with an AI as my pair-programmer, because I had a problem of my own: files everywhere. Photoshop files on one SSD, photos on three SD cards, PDFs in a folder I'd forgotten existed. What I wanted was one place to say "everything for Job 1" — without moving or copying a single file.

The app was called Project:Alias because it made aliases for projects. It was a
codename. It was never supposed to leave the house.

Then it became good enough to show people, and a codename wasn't going to cut it.

Act 2: Aerial View, and the people who got there first

The first real name was Aerial View: you look down at all your stuff from above. Lovely.
I did what every responsible dev does and Googled it.

It turns out there is a Mac App Store app called Aerial, pitched almost word for word like mine, and a hugely popular open-source Aerial screensaver that owns the first ten pages of every search containing the words "aerial" and "Mac". My app would have been the second most famous thing called Aerial on a Mac, which is a nice way of saying "invisible".

Back to the whiteboard. I tried Topdown. I tried High-Angle. I tried AeroDir, which I rejected within a minute because it sounds like a utility from Windows 2000 that defragments your feelings.

Act 3: Luftview (lifespan: one day)

Then I had what felt like a stroke of genius. I'm German, I work in English, and I love the mix. Luft means air. Luftview! Bilingual! Clever! Nothing on the internet called that! I renamed the whole app.

It lasted about a day.

I showed it to a few people and the reactions were, how do I put this, polite. It
sounded like a German-English hybrid because it was a German-English hybrid, and it turns out the only person delighted by that was me. Real feedback beats a clever theory, so out it went, and I got to experience the single most dev thing there is: renaming an app so many times that its data folder has had three addresses. (There's now a little chain of migrations in the code that goes ProjectAlias → Luftview → Caracara, just in case any Mac anywhere is stuck in the past. It's the most loyal code I've ever written.)

Act 4: The Search for a Name With Zero Collisions (Spoiler: There Isn't One)

At this point my AI collaborator and I got systematic. Every candidate had to survive the same gauntlet: domain, GitHub, App Store, and then — the part that humbles you — the actual trademark registers, queried through TMview, which pulls in the German, EU and US offices and a dozen others. Web search says "looks clear!" The register says "lol, no."

What followed was a parade:

überblick (German for "overview"; I wanted to always write it lowercase because I'm that guy). Rejected immediately: a real German software company has been selling team-communication software under exactly that name since 2017. In my own country.

Horst. I loved this one. Horst is also German for an eagle's nest, and it's a funny
old-man first name, like Fritz. Then I remembered Vollhorst, which is a very
common German insult roughly meaning "complete idiot". German readers would hit the insult before the bird. Next.

• Eyrie: already a Mac app, in an uncomfortably similar space.

Aerie: owned by American Eagle Outfitters, who have taken even Amazon to court over it. I will not be funding that fight on a solo-dev budget. Or ever.

BOP / BEV / AVFM: I briefly tried acronyms. BOP is a blowout preventer, BEV
is a battery electric vehicle, and AVFM is a men's-rights website I'd rather not be
near. Acronyms dropped.

Kestrel, Goshawk, Sparrowhawk, Osprey: all real software, several of them very much alive. (Kestrel is literally the default web server in ASP.NET Core.) It turns out "fast bird that hunts from above" is exactly what every dev reaches for first.

Shikra: a famous hardware-hacking board. Not a legal problem, but I'd be launching into the exact crowd that already knows it as a thing you plug into routers.

I also really liked Fink, and then suspected it was a ride-sharing or food-delivery
app. (Finch-family names, for what it's worth, turned out to be heavily taken.)

Somewhere in there it dawned on me that the availability of a name is inversely
proportional to how nice it sounds. If it makes you smile in the shower, a venture-backed startup already has the .com.

Act 5: Caracara

Then a name came up that cleared everything. Caracara is a real bird: a clever, slightly odd falcon that, instead of diving at one target, walks around on the ground and rummages. Which is — honestly — a pretty accurate description of what my app does with your scattered drives.

No software company, no product, no collisions on the registers in Germany, the EU or the US for anything software-shaped. (The first pass turned up only a single French registration that may or may not even be software; a later one found something called CaraCara Wallet, which I filed under "known and acknowledged".) I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, and I'll say it again at the end.

And then, naturally: the .app domain I'd checked was unregistered… and when I came back, it wasn't. Of course it wasn't.

I took a deep breath, asked my AI whether we had to start all over, we looked at the
evidence, and decided no. Caracara it was. I redid the icon, got rid of the old art, and for the first time in weeks, the app and its name sounded like they belonged together.

Act 6: The Salad

Here's where it gets silly.

I don't have one app. I have three. There's the file manager, there's card&board (a kanban and canvas app), and there's cucumber (a budgeting app). The apps talk to each other, so I wanted them to feel like a family, with a shared "bundle" name.

I looked at what I had: a cucumber. And Caracara was now… a bird. And I thought: what if it's a salad? The Salad Bundle. Cucumber stays. The file manager becomes Eisberg (iceberg lettuce!) or Lettuce. card&board becomes Tomato & Onion.

Reader, I want you to appreciate how long I held on to this idea. Roughly one afternoon.

So: birds. All three. The Aviary Bundle.

Act 7: Forty Birds Later

Now I just needed two more bird names. How hard could it be?

I checked roughly forty. Common ones, uncommon ones, German ones. Ibis (a drawing app with millions of users). Petrel (a giant oil-and-gas software suite). Ruff (a very popular Python linter). Finch (several funded companies). And then the German escape route, which I was very proud of, until: Elster (Germany's federal tax filing portal — nobody wants to be confused with that), Eule, Spatz,Gimpel, Meise. All taken.

Out of about forty candidates, only two came back genuinely clear:

Pirol, the German word for the golden oriole. Easy to pronounce in English and
German, which has become my one non-negotiable.

Curlew, a wading bird with a long curved beak. It's less easy to pronounce in German, and I tried to find a replacement, but nothing else survived.

So the final lineup:

Together: The Aviary Bundle. Which, as an unexpected side effect, also means that I now have a very easy answer for the day somebody asks what the apps have in common. They have wings.

What I learned (for the next dev who has to name an app)

Search the actual trademark registers early. Google lies by omission. A name can look perfectly clean on the web and be registered in a class you didn't know existed. TMview covers many national and EU offices in one place and is free.

Never fall in love before you've checked. Every name I loved (Horst, Fink, überblick) died. Every name that survived was one I merely liked.

Real reactions beat clever theories. Luftview made perfect sense in my head. It made zero sense in other people's.

A themed family needs one theme. One cucumber in a bird bundle is a joke at your own expense.

Make renaming cheap. Keep your internal codename internal. (My Xcode project is still called ProjectAlias. It will be called ProjectAlias until the heat death of the universe, and I've made my peace with that.)

Pick arbitrary names. A bird has nothing to do with file management, and that's a feature: arbitrary names are easier to protect than descriptive ones.

1. Register your domains the moment you pick the name. See: the .app that vanished.

A disclaimer, because I promised: I'm a designer, not a lawyer, and "clear on my search" does not mean "legally yours". I haven't registered trademarks for any of these yet.

Where to find them

Caracara is in daily use here. It's not a download yet, because Apple wants a developer account before it lets strangers open the thing, but it's coming:

• Home: https://aviarybundle.com

If you have a great, completely unclaimed bird name, I'm all ears. I can't promise I'll use it. But I will absolutely check it.