According to the Node-Webkit wiki the manifest for a program requires a name and this name must be globally unique because it determines the name of the directory that data files for the program are stored in.
I haven't been able to find anything else that this name is used for. Is it safe to just use a UUID as the name listed in the manifest? Or will that be exposed to the user somewhere potentially?
It's more typically related to the common program name that the user sees, but it doesn't have to be. For example on the Mac, the standard location for app specific data is ~/Library/Application Support/. When I look there I see things like GIMP, Skype, XDK &c. If your app happened to have the same name as another app, it would cause problems as they'd both writing to the same location, i.e. if I gave my app the name GIMP, both apps would try to write files to that dir.
Typically a user doesn't have to access this directly, so there's probably no harm in using a UUID here, though I would probably append it to a name related to my app name, just for clarity/simplicity, i.e. instead of making the name foo I'd make it foo-<UUID>.
But I'm no expert . . . .