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Kevin Walzer, software developer.

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Reconsidering "good enough"

Sometimes, good enough isn't good enough.

A few months ago I suggested that perfection wasn't the ideal goal in software; instead I championed "good enough," a strategy that lets you get a product out the door that does most of what needs to be done.

"Good enough" is indeed useful for shipping products, but I've come to the conclusion that perfection isn't such a bad goal after all--if you define "perfection" as a long-term goal that you strive for over multiple product releases. Even if you don't reach perfection, you still improve.

The reason I'm re-considering the goal of "good enough" is that I'm still quite unhappy with some of the additions I've made to my programming toolkit--specifically, integration of Tcl/Tk with drag-and-drop on the Mac, and accessing the Services menu from Tcl/Tk applications. You can drag files and text to my Tk applications, and they provide a service that can be accessed from the Services menu. But that's a one-way street; currently, you can't drag items from a Tk application to other applications, and you can't access the Services menu from my Tk programs. This feels incomplete to me.

So, over the past month or so, I've been working on improvements in these areas. I've gotten a working implementation of Tk applications as a "drag source" committed to TkDND's source code archive, and I've completely rewritten my Tcl Services package to properly integrate with Cocoa's Services API, both in sending data to Tk applications and accessing the Services menu from Tk applications; in the case of the Tcl Services package, it's a rare instance where a complete re-write makes sense. In fact, after a bit more stress-testing of the Tcl Services package in my own programs, I plan to add it to my growing list of Tcl extensions that provide integration of Tcl/Tk with various aspects of the Cocoa API.

I still don't feel compelled to revisit AppleScript support and printing support in my programs; there, the current implementation is truly "good enough," in that it satisfies all my current and projected use cases, and where a re-write would represent a huge amount of work with only a marginal improvement in the functionality offered by my current packages.

Look for these new improvements in new releases of my apps in the near future.

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