Removing modality

I read today the humanized blog and I find it’s (very) true what Aza Raskin wrote in Monolog Boxes and Transparent Messages: the best interace should aim to minimize the interruptions in what the user is doing.

When you are “in the zone”, especially when writing or designinig or programming, any interruption in your flow of tought is dangerous and makes you to lose that special status of sharp, focused attention that fosters creativity. Modality in an application interface causes these breaks the main activity and should be reduced when/where possible.

I know that there are many points that can be made better in TheTyper to make the writing esperience even more seamless, and I’ll look into ways to reduce the modal interactions that can interrupt the writer. The first task is to embed the spell check into the main editor, enabling some kind of check-as-you-type mode of operation.

I don’t see many more sources of modal interactions that can be removed from the interface, since all the rest of the popups are for operations which aren’t usually done while writing (e.g. changing the fonts or exporting the document) but nevertheless I’ll need to think a bit more on these issues.