From a branding point of view I like this name much better. It's much easier to communicate, two simple words with obvious spellings. If I say hey you should checkout Crossfilter, they can easily look that up. With Tesseract, not so much. Crossfilter is also suggestive of what it does, and the name helps to reinforce what it's for. Overall, very large improvement, imo.
Presumably this is to prevent naming collision with the existing Tesseract, an OCR engine. Its generally worth searching "my new awesome name" "software" prior to picking a name.
Agreed, the first time I read about Tesseract/Crossfilter on HN a couple weeks ago I clicked the link thinking it was a new version of the OCR. Just to find out it was a completely unrelated project.
Well, it didn't hurt the project much to ship it first and worry about the name later. Also I remember reading somewhere that one of the creators was aware of the OCR engine but didn't anticipate it being a problem. So googling wouldn't have helped.
Much better name and not just because of the naming collision. Tesseract was really smart but you had to have a dictionary and know the company is Square to get it. Crossfire has a huge potential audience of not just ubernerds.
I agree, and its nice to see open source projects which had naming collisions but blossomed with a new name: it's hard to imagine Firefox being 'Phoenix' or 'Firebird', both seem generic now that we know the strong identity of Firefox.
