Chapter 20Modes
In 1985, when writing Apple’s Mac developer documentation called Inside Macintosh [Ros86], author Caroline Rose deemed modes to be important enough to mention them at the very start of the very first volume. She writes that “a mode is a part of an application that the user has to formally enter and leave, and that restricts the operations that can be performed while the mode is in effect.”
Basically, a mode is a state that an application or an individual window is in that changes how the application or window reacts to user input. Modes can be a source of usability problems. Rose writes that “since people don’t usually operate ...
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