Hi, Does anyone have good examples of software that has a fantastic first run experience? Some software obviously just works "out of the box". However, there is significant software that requires some configuration before it's usable.
Any examples would be much appreciated.
Cheers, Yi
Most things from Google are good in that regard. Firefox is alright, as is OpenOffice (albeit a bit slow, but can be tweaked).
I was very impressed by Opera the first time I tried it; within a week I switched from Firefox. It comes with a lot of features such as an IRC and Bittorrent client, which is important to me at school, where there is a quota of 50 megs on disk space! Most of Opera's features are eventually available/copied to Firefox as plugins, but I still prefer Opera at home because the text looks better.
Time Machine for Mac OS X 10.5. If you have a Time Capsule, all you do is flick a switch in a control panel to turn it on. When you need a backed-up file you can visually go back to a point in time when you knew it existed. You can browse your hard drive (or just the directories that were backed up at that point in time) as it was in the past to retrieve it, and when you do, you can see it being copied to the present time. Gimmicky, but now I love deleting files just so I can restore them later.
I don't think it's possible to answer this question in absolute terms. What's a fantastic "out of the box"/"first run" experience depends on what's the expectation of the person running it. If the product meets or especially exceeds that expectation, that's a great experience.
Here's a simple example. I consider Google Chrome browser to be a great first run experience because it is simple, installs nicely, and is super fast. For some others (especially many reading stackoverflow.com), it might be flawed because their expectation is that Chrome can also seamlessly import their Firefox or whatever other plugins, which was not part of Chrome's original features. So for them, it would not be a great experience because they were expecting something that wasn't there.
Apple, iPod and iTunes are other classic examples. Many people (myself included) consider finding and buying music from iTunes a great easy experience. Many others find it appalling because until recently, the music wasn't (and some of it still isn't) DRM-free.
Basecamp has an incredible out-of-the-box experience. This is a result of keeping things extremely simple, having a hosted solution (no install/setup) and also brief but noticeable welcome messages explaining how to get things started.
Some other examples of things that work the first time and work perfectly as soon as you start using them would be TripIt, FogBugz and BlinkSale.
I would say Ubuntu has a good OOB experience. It was a very simple to get installed and running. I've never bothered with the Live CD but I hear that's also great and it's fantastic how that allows you to try Ubuntu without actually having to install it.
OS X, Parallels
Windows 7, Vista (somewhat controversial I suspect)
How about the iPhone? Almost all Apple product are shipped with minimal manuals.