Out of box experience
Have you ever bought hardware from Apple?
Lovely wasn’t it?
I don’t mean the kit was necessarily lovely — Apple have build their fair share of clunkers in the past. I’m talking about the experience of getting your iPod, PowerBook, PowerMac or whatever out of its box for the first time. It’s obvious that Apple have spent a good deal of time on making that out of box experience as satisfying as possible. A box that you will probably only use once seems to have had as much care lavished on it as the thing it contains.
Maybe Sony have got better at this sort of thing, but I remember when I bought a MiniDisc player a few years ago. Where my iPod came in a great looking box that opened in a satisfying way which made it easy to get at the goodies it contained, the MiniDisc came in just another box and was awkward to get at to boot.
I felt, and still feel, good about my iPod. I haven’t a clue where my MiniDisc Recorder has got to.
So, why is this post in the Typo category?
Well…
Typo’s out of box experience sucks. From the point of view of someone who just wants to get their blogging engine up and running, it’s about as friendly as a cut snake.
I know this because, in the last few days I have spent hours on the #typo IRC channel, walking folks through a set of simple steps to get to a working typo installation. Well, I thought they were simple — apparently they aren’t. Which is why it’s great to talk to real users even if it can be dispiriting sometimes.
So, we need to work to improve typo’s out of box experience. Here’s my current plan:
- The user unpacks the typo distribution outside the html tree somewhere.
- At a shell prompt, she types
rake configure - A webrick server kicks off and the user is prompted to point their browser at http://localhost/3000 or some such ‘private’ url.
- Typo walks her through a straightforward sequence of steps which configure the real typo installation.
- At the end of the process, assuming it’s possible, the user will have appropriate symbolic links set up, a database.yml that makes sense and (ideally) a running blog engine.
Now all that remains is to implement it.
