Andrew C. Greenberg wrote:

> Jan writes:

[ snip ]

> > As I remember, one of the major benefits of using a multiwindowed UI was
to
> > avoid being forced into a "mode". Seems like the Blue Book talked about
> > what a vile concept "modes" were. At ANY moment, the system should be
> > responsive to your new input. Being frozen and unreceptive to input is
> > simply not ok. I agree that in some cases the system may have to respond
> > back and indicate, "I can't stop" or "I can't undo that" (for example,
> > selecting doit on Smalltalk := nil. might be hard to undo).
> 

> Modes are present in every UI.  A menu is a mode.  Indeed, a shift-key is a 
> mode.  The idea is that modes should be either reduced to brief and 
> emminently understandable "gestures," like shift-click and drag, menu-pulls 
> or metakeys (perhaps -- the complexity these gestures add are apparent to 
> anyone who has had to train a GUI newbie), or to the broadest, top-level 
> interruption or process (an application, of course, is a "mode").  Yes, 
> modes are vile, and most modes are unnecessary and should be eliminated. 
> But the harm of modes is not the inconvenience of waiting, but rather the 
> complexity for a user that performing the same act does different things at 
> different times.
> 

I disagree that modes are "vile" or even undesirable.  Some of the early,
highly publicized objections to modes were not so much targeted at things that
were inherent to modes but to things that were characteristic of modes at the
time, such as:
   - it was often unclear what the current mode was and meant;
   - it was often difficult to change modes.

Overlapping windows solved these problems (each window _is_ a mode).

No mode can do it all, and it's really not undesirable to have multiple
specialized modes for different tasks.  There is some residual vileness in
current GUIs in things like modal dialogs, but the problem is not in the
existance of modes, it's in the restrictions placed upon the user (e.g.
forcing the user into a certain sequence of actions) when in the mode, which
are unnecessary.

....Mike

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