Windows Installation and "Discoverability"
In the very early days, OAK installations on Windows were sometimes a bit…clunky. But this is long since a thing of the past. The Windows installation process is now buttery smooth.
How smooth is buttery smooth? How about three clicks and 30 seconds smooth? Check out the installation video below. Although the video is longer than 30 seconds (most of which is an excited engineer gushing about OAK capabilities), you’ll be able to see just how seamless Windows installations have become.
Discoverability: Just Work. Ask Questions Later.
Having a simple and seamless install that leads to an instantly functioning product is one of the core tenets of our team. We're all tired of tools with steep learning curves that become an impediment to you reaching your goals. You shouldn’t have to learn the whole tool just to get something working.
We call this philosophy “discoverability.” It means that the tool you need just works. You may not really understand why it works, but you can discover why it works after it’s already working.
This goes back to the famous joke about Windows, Linux, and Mac from the early-2000s:
Mac: My computer works, and I don't know why.
Linux: My computer doesn't work, and I know why.
Windows: My computer doesn't work, and I don't know why.
Notice that there's a missing quadrant there. What is it? “My computer works, and I know why.”
We aim to make it so that you can start with “My OAK camera works and I don't know why” and then over time move into the “My OAK camera works and I know why” phase as your needs or interests change over time.
Of course, the operating system joke is 15 years old now, and in technology years, that means it’s (relatively speaking) about as old as a pterodactyl or a triceratops. All OSs these days are in the “just work” category, thankfully.
Open Hardware, Software, and AI Training
One of the keys with the OAK ecosystem–what allows us to make everything so clean–is we build all the pieces:
An installer that allows everything to work on a Windows machine, no matter what other development environments you have installed, is an example of things just working. That the installation automation system is fully open-sourced is what allows you to know “why” it works.
When you build something with OAK, you can leverage the open-source, just-works installation automation system for your project, and then customize it to what you need.
In this way, we aim to have the same just-works experience of an iPhone, but then give you the capability to take it from there and run with it: to see and understand what we did. Which allows you to not just consume great technology, as is the case with Apple, but build great technology yourself. We can’t wait to see what you come up with.
