Examples of modes

Guillermo Rauch said “One of my North Stars in design is No Modes, or mode minimization. It takes a lot of hard work and ingenuity to get there.”

Francisco Hanna asked “What is a modern example of an application with modes? Besides the vim and emacs examples in the article.”

So here’s a list of many modes in our smartphone and online worlds:

In modern apps

• Editing vs viewing a photo
• Browser’s incognito mode
• Bezier path edit points mode
• Maps turn-by-turn directions
• Editing iPhone home screen
• Camera night mode
• Full screening a YouTube video
• Dark mode
• Do not disturb
• Airplane & low power mode
• Cookie consent pop-up (did the user tap “Accept” or “Decline”?)
• Subscription pricing tiers
• Browser’s reader mode
• Offline mode
• macOS Sonoma’s game mode

In web development

• CI=true env variable
• NODE_ENV=production vs NODE_ENV=development
• async function vs function
• Code that checks typeof window === 'undefined'
• Server vs client rendering a React component
• package.json’s type of module vs commonjs
• HTTP Transfer-Encoding: chunked
• User agent sniffing e.g. detecting search engine crawler or a particular browser