Custom .desktop file -- name doesn't show up in Unity dash on Ubuntu 13.04

You can validate your .desktop files with desktop-file-validate *.desktop and then, if there are no errors (it'll tell you what to fix), run sudo update-desktop-database to actually update the system's database.

I just ran into the same problem that you did. I messed around with a bunch of settings within my .desktop files to try to get the name to show up in the Unity launcher, since I had created the .desktop files in ~/Desktop then moved them to ~/.local/share/applications

All I had to do to get the Unity application launcher to show the names is log out of Ubuntu and log back in. Pretty lame, I know, but it worked.

At least this shows that in my case (and probably yours too) the .desktop files were not somehow wrong. After all, in my case, the desktop-file-validate program didn't list any errors. There was probably some name cache within Unity that needed to be cleared. It would be more satisfying to know how to do that without logging out, but this workaround is good enough for me for now. Hope this observation helps someone else!

Search in Dash for alacarte to open Main Menu:

In Main Menu search for the application that doesn't have name in Dash. When you find it, click Properties and give it a name (in your case Sublime Text 2 application, in my case Ask Ubuntu web application):