Out of the Box Experience refers to what people just using Tk encounter by
default, without a lot of mucking around and tweaking with settings. One of
the big attractions with Tk in the early days was that you could just do:
pack [button .b -text "Hello World" -command exit]
and it would do the right thing. I'd submit now that this is no longer the
case. Think about spacing, menus, the effort to then add a toolbar,
statusbar, etc.
Out of box experience covers the "easy things should be easy, hard things
should be possible" mantra. It means menus and such coming up, spacing
being done right, correct configuration options, shortcuts being there, etc.
It also extends to other areas like the right widgets being available (e.g.
toolbars since that is an idiom used in most every 'real' app), a good demo
script, accessible and useful documentation, etc.
Posted at Aug 10/2003 01:29 PM:
DKF: I'd say this is as important, or perhaps more so, than the adding of extra widgets. It contributes a lot to beginners staying with us, and cuts development time for all us experts too...
See also Application Framework.
Posted at Aug 16/2003 03:08 PM:
DKF: I think doing anything elaborate here is not a good idea though. Anything complex had better be able to be built out of simpler ideas. Out-of-the-box experience should be about things like the fact that you can put together your API without specifying loads of options, not about having scripts that (poorly) try to predict everything you might want from a GUI; there are just too many special cases.
Posted at Sep 12/2003 01:35 AM:
Vince: An important part of the out of box experience is responding to the user's choice of fonts (font sizes), colours and even screen resolution/dpi, particularly on Windows. If Tk could respond to changes in all of these on the fly, even better.
Posted at Sep 15/2003 01:15 AM:
DKF: In theory we should be able to do that. In practice, we need someone (someone with experience on a suitable platform, especially Windows) to do a bit of work to make it happen. If anyone wants to take on TIP#64
[link] and make it happen, they're welcome. (It's currently deferred pending someone to do the work, but reversing that in the face of a putative implementation is no problem.
NB: This particular TIP does not need a vote; it has already passed one.)
Posted at Jan 16/2004 03:58 AM:
PT: TIP 64 doesn't really do this right so TIP 145 is the replacement. For TIP 145 is pretty much complete, it just requires a set of x-platform system font names.
