> NO MODES
That's a lie though. All GUIs have modes all over the place. For example:
- When I click into a text field, I go into Insert mode.
- When I tab away from the text field, I'm in some sort of Select mode.
These are clearly different modes because keys will do different things depending on the situation (e.g. [Space] in Select mode will click the focused button, but in Insert mode will insert text into the focused text field).
> [Tesler's] career forms a link from the pioneering work of Doug Engelbart, Stu Card and Tim Mott, to the emergence of a dominant design for the PC, as described by Bill Atkinson, Cordell Ratzlaff and Paul Bradley.
When he was at Apple, Larry Tesler had a license plate saying “NO MODES.”
(from http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/LarryTesler)