Bruce Tognazzini

I definitely wish that I could group tabs when I am working. I keep groups of tabs together, and these tab groups have long lifetimes. I also open various differently size windows depending on the content of each page. All of this is to work around the mess of "good enough" user interfaces that I deal with everyday. If I see myself opening more "ad hoc" tabs, I closed them as soon as I can. I don't need any more chaos. Right now I am not at work, and I have three browser windows open and there are no scroll bars. I have managed to turn off tabs for the most part using Firefox userChrome.css and about:config. If I need another browser page, I'll open another browser window. When I have more than 4 or 5 browser windows I start stacking/offsetting the windows. Unfortunately, "Tabs" are modes. http://www.nomodes.com/

The guy who invented copy/paste, Larry Tesler, recently passed away last month. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51567695 > Possibly Mr Tesler's most famous innovation, the cut and paste command, was reportedly based on the old method of editing in which people would physically cut portions of printed text and glue them elsewhere. > The command was incorporated in Apple's software on the Lisa computer in 1983, and the original Macintosh that was released the following year. Here is Larry's website. RIP. http://nomodes.com/Larry_Tesler_Consulting/Home.html

Not just Steve Jobs: the development of the Apple Newton (arguably the precursor to the iPad) was in part led by Larry "NO MODES" Tesler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Tesler http://www.nomodes.com/

In the late 1960s/early 1970s, before he went to Xerox PARC and Apple, Larry Tesler wrote an early document system (page formatter) called PUB, for use by other computer programmers at the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL). He has put up the old manual online at http://www.nomodes.com/pub_manual.html with some modern annotations. This PUB was influential in at least two ways: - It was Donald Knuth's first introduction to computer typesetting, and he used to use this program as a convenient way to prepare errata for The Art of Computer Programming on a computer, and hand out the resulting printouts. (At that time he was thinking of computer tools as something like typewriters and in no way related to "real book printing", until he saw the result of a "real" digital typesetter in 1977, which inspired him to write TeX.) In 2012 when he learned of this manual he wrote in TUGboat strongly recommending it to others: https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb33-3/tb105knut.pdf - Another of its users was Brian Reid, who went on to develop Scribe, which itself was influential in two ways: (1) It was a strong influence on Leslie Lamport's LaTeX (in fact LaTeX can be viewed as bringing Scribe syntax/ideas to TeX), and (2) It seems to have been influential in the development of markup languages in general, e.g. from GML to SGML (this part I'm not sure of and there are conflicting accounts), which eventually led to HTML and XML. In fact it would have been better than XML according to Douglas Crockford here:…

> Tesler's Theorem (ca. 1970). My formulation of what others have since called the “AI Effect”. As commonly quoted: “Artificial Intelligence is whatever hasn't been done yet”. What I actually said was: “Intelligence is whatever machines haven't done yet”. Many people define humanity partly by our allegedly unique intelligence. Whatever a machine—or an animal—can do must (those people say) be something other than intelligence. https://www.nomodes.com/larry-tesler-consulting/adages-and-coinages

A career in full from his own CV: "Board director for a FTSE 250 company, vp in three Fortune 500 corporations, president of two small software firms. 32 years building and managing teams of software and hardware engineers, designers, researchers, scientists, product managers and marketers to deliver innovative customer-centered products." http://www.nomodes.com/Tesler_CV_Public.pdf

Yes! Thanks! "Primary inventor of modeless editing and cut, copy, paste." http://www.nomodes.com/Larry_Tesler_Consulting/CV_files/NOMODES.jpg Since cca 1973. Reference: doi:10.1145/2212877.2212896

Larry Tesler (source: http://www.nomodes.com/Larry_Tesler_Consulting/Adages_and_Coinages.htm… "Tesler's Theorem (ca. 1970). My formulation of what others have since called the “AI Effect”. As commonly quoted: “Artificial Intelligence is whatever hasn't been done yet”. What I actually said was: “Intelligence is whatever machines haven't done yet”."

Depending on which measurements you are talking about, experience is largely irrelevant- as most of the "objective measurements" we are talking about, are about the quality of the UI itself, not the specific quality of the user. here are some http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOMS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fittss_law Regarding modes, I encourage you to read this 1973 study, which spawned the first modeless text editor. http://www.nomodes.com/Larry_Tesler_Consulting/1973_User_Study_Notes.h… I wish I had ready access to the piles of studies that show modal interfaces are bad. I trust they exist. I just haven't seen them myself!

Vi was 1976. The Canon Cat was 1987, and Raskin's work on the Macintosh was before it was launched in 1984. This work was a _response_ to vi and modal editing. And it was _right_ because it's how basically every GUI app and web app in the world works. Sure, programs have functions that while you perform them put you in a special restricted environment, but it's not a mode. If there's a search-and-replace operation going on, you can see that on the screen. You can see if you're browsing menus or stepping through a tab bar or something. In modal programs, it's the same program all the time, but in one mode, for instance, pressing ``dd`` types a double D like in "middle", and in another mode, it deletes the whole line, and unless you are experienced enough to look for a single character somewhere else on the screen, you don't know which it will do. You have to memorize the sequence of operations and know where you are. If I blindfold you, sit you in front of someone else's computer, take the blindfold off and ask you what "dd" will do at this point, you might not be able to tell. And that is bad UI, and bad design, and we have learned better now. The fact is that this is _proved_ by _every user-facing computer having a GUI. Larry Tesler was right: DON'T MODE ME IN. Even his website is NOMODES.COM: http://nomodes.com/Larry_Tesler_Consulting/Home.html

> Look at the Xerox Star, it had everything the Mac had (and more) years earlier. The difference was in its price. You might want to learn more about the history: the work at Xerox PARC was enormously influential but it wasn't happening in a vacuum: https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html “Finally, as several authors have pointed out, there were actually two visits by groups from Apple to Xerox PARC in 1979. Steve Jobs was on the second of the two. Jef Raskin, who helped arranged both visits, explained that he wanted Jobs to visit PARC to understand work that was already going on at Apple. The Macintosh project had escaped the chopping block several times, and Raskin had tried to explain to Jobs the significance of the technologies it was incorporating. By showing that other companies considered this kind of work exciting, Raskin hoped to boost the value of the Macintosh's work in Jobs' eyes. Unbeknownst to Raskin, Jobs had his own reasons for visiting PARC: Xerox's venture capital arm had recently made an investment in Apple, and had agreed to show Apple what was going on in its lab.” In particular, pay attention to the details about how much work went into things which might have started somewhere like PARC but required significant work developing affordable and reliable designs, coming up with design metaphors and concepts to make the GUI consistent and appealing to use, etc. Bruce Horn wrote a nice summary years back on all of the refinements which…