techno.blog("Dion")

In my feeling touch-y post on some of the fun usability issues and opportunities, I touched on shortcut keys.

As I have continued to learn more about the webOS platform, one of the biggest changes for me has been knowing that a physical keyboard is available.

This is why we put in shortcut keys for the Facebook app. I can now very easily jump to an area of the application by touching the gesture area and pushing a key. I would love to see shortcuts available in many other webOS apps, and a “GreaseyPalm” (greasemonkey type system on webOS) would be awesome… enabling me to easily tie my own in… but that is another story :)

Other than shortcut keys though, I have found more and more applications using the “Just Type” metaphor. It turns out that many apps can be smart about what a user would want to do if they just type.

We implemented this on the Facebook app. If you are on the news feed and you start to type, assume that this is a status update, pull up that UI and put the content in there.

Bad Kitty and other Twitter clients do a similar thing for assuming that you want to Tweet something.

My favourite example is in the core launcher itself. I remember being incredibly frustrated with home screen layout on the iPhone, and on webOS at first. Having to move icons around on the phone is a pain. I was excited when they added the ability to manage apps in iTunes, but the UI manages to be just about as frustrating in there.

It took me awhile to realise that I don’t need to use the launcher in this way at all. I can just type, and it will find the app I want. Hmm, where have I seen this before? Quicksilver! Ubiquity! Those examples go even further and offer actions that are even pluggable and scriptable… which would be awesome on a mobile device too.

This is yet another item on my checklist when I build an app. If the user started to type right now, could I do something smart that just works?

Just Type. Check!

Implementing Keyboard Shortcuts

A few folks asked about keyboard shortcuts. To implement them a la Facebook, you simply use the shortcut attribute for actions in the

        var appMenuModel = {
            items: [Mojo.Menu.editItem, {
                label: $L("Preferences & Accounts"),
                command: Mojo.Menu.prefsCmd
            },
            {
                label: $L("Navigate to..."),
                items: [
                {
                    label: $L("News Feed"),
                    command: "gotoNewsFeed",
                    shortcut: 'h' // H = home
                },
                // ...
                ]
            }
         }