No Modes – The Future of all Web Applications

Super underwhelming. The title and description led me to believe this was going to be speculative and a 'call to arms'. It was not. I did appreciate the history of modes. It was a professional and well put together presentation, however.

You seemed a little nervous at the beginning but then you hit your stride. The historical perspective was interesting. There were a few times where the videos showing the editing were a few seconds longer than necessary to demonstrate the concept. But it was nice to show things animated and safer than trying to live demo each situation. The real world examples (pop up while driving) might have been contrived but were entertaining and made the point.

At the end, you walk through improving the app through changes involving modals and popovers, yet those are not your suggested method and are not necessary steps in the conversion. Walking through that evolution during your background was useful, but including them during your actual improvement example is probably unnecessary. You could have used that time to dive into actual code modifications with a little more detail.

I would have been interested in even more evidence that modes are actually bad. Are there counterarguments? Perhaps modes make mistakes less likely? Are there more modern luminaries who support them in the web world? Are there several popular example sites which embrace the concept? Are there modern sites sticking with modes?

Thanks for the presentation!

@andrewcassell Wanted to say I enjoyed talk about modeless interfaces, made me think about how to fix “programmer interfaces” I build ;)
(https://twitter.com/grmpyprogrammer/status/469868148184080385)

@andrewcassell Wanted to say I enjoyed talk about modeless interfaces, made me think about how to fix “programmer interfaces” I build ;)
(https://twitter.com/grmpyprogrammer/status/469868148184080385)