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I wonder what Tesler thought about modern user interfaces in light of his "no modes" philosophy. Today, each program/website effectively functions as a separat

I wonder what Tesler thought about modern user interfaces in light of his "no modes" philosophy. Today, each program/website effectively functions as a separate "mode" where everything potentially looks, behaves, and responds completely differently. There's no consistency and it's a huge part of the reason computers are frustrating to use for most people.

brain5ide 7y ago
To be fair, computers were frustrating to most people all the time. It's just that they've become frustrating even to the ones that were comfortable before. I'm always on this fence of whether it's become shit or I've become too old here at 29, and having felt it since 25. Cyberpunk would say both are true.
TuringTest 7y ago
Bear in mind that the definition of "mode" includes a subjective part in its definition, i.e. an interface is in a mode if the user thinks of the input in a state as the same action with different results than the same input on a different state. [1] For example, single click on a web link navigates to a new page, but single click on a desktop folder merely selects it. But this does not necessarily applies to content. If you have two different apps, with very different media and data (e.g. one is a spreadsheet, the other a slide presentation), they don't represent different modes if they respond the same to the same actions. You may have a zoom button in both which works the same, a similar color palette, similar scroll bars... This is the reason why GUIs are composed with a small set of widgets, and these represent standardised behaviours that work essentially the same across all applications that use them (and also, this is why it's such a terrible idea to build widgets that deviate from these expected behaviours). Tesla should know, he was there when they invented them. [2] You have a point that it's too easy to find applications that don't follow the standards and reinvent the wheel for no benefit, and also that the standards only extend to low-level interactions - before mobile OSs, there never was a unified metaphor for reading, storing and sharing information at the end-user space. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(user_interface)#Definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(user_interface)#Definiti... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20040511051426/https://computerhistory.org/events/lectures/appleint_10281997/appleint_xscript.shtml https://web.archive.org/web/20040511051426/https://computerh...

brain5ide 7y ago

To be fair, computers were frustrating to most people all the time. It's just that they've become frustrating even to the ones that were comfortable before. I'm always on this fence of whether it's become shit or I've become too old here at 29, and having felt it since 25. Cyberpunk would say both are true.

TuringTest 7y ago

Bear in mind that the definition of "mode" includes a subjective part in its definition, i.e. an interface is in a mode if the user thinks of the input in a state as the same action with different results than the same input on a different state. [1] For example, single click on a web link navigates to a new page, but single click on a desktop folder merely selects it. But this does not necessarily applies to content. If you have two different apps, with very different media and data (e.g. one is a spreadsheet, the other a slide presentation), they don't represent different modes if they respond the same to the same actions. You may have a zoom button in both which works the same, a similar color palette, similar scroll bars... This is the reason why GUIs are composed with a small set of widgets, and these represent standardised behaviours that work essentially the same across all applications that use them (and also, this is why it's such a terrible idea to build widgets that deviate from these expected behaviours). Tesla should know, he was there when they invented them. [2] You have a point that it's too easy to find applications that don't follow the standards and reinvent the wheel for no benefit, and also that the standards only extend to low-level interactions - before mobile OSs, there never was a unified metaphor for reading, storing and sharing information at the end-user space. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(user_interface)#Definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(user_interface)#Definiti... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20040511051426/https://computerhistory.org/events/lectures/appleint_10281997/appleint_xscript.shtml https://web.archive.org/web/20040511051426/https://computerh...