Google Reader’s keyboard shortcuts help panel
Hitting ‘?’ at anytime during your use of Google Reader will display this, what I think is an, incredible HUD for Reader’s keyboard shortcuts.
When I saw this I immediately thought: “Wow, Google really gets this whole web application thing.”. But what else can we learn from this? I think there is definitely something to be said for quickly explaining the keyboard shortcuts in a way that is available throughout the entire application, at any time, with one keyboard shortcut.
One thing I know we have to work on better at Viddler, and this is partially my responsibility, is that we have a ton of features that are sort of in between development, testing, and live. We’ve got a simple player, which you can see in use on the top-right hand side of our new front page, we have a play all player - in use by the DadLabs team, and a JavaScript library to control our player. All of these are live, usable, and yet poorly documented and not easily accessible by our community.
Seeing this in Google Reader has prompted me to get my butt in gear and begin to, at the very least, document these features that Viddler has so that people can find them.
March 20th, 2008 at 10:16 am
Colin, that should be ‘Shift+?’.
March 20th, 2008 at 10:20 am
rzklkng: Maybe I should have made that clear… but without hitting SHIFT, you can’t really type a question mark (?) can you?
March 20th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Oops. Point conceeded.
March 20th, 2008 at 10:32 am
First off, great come back to the above comment. HA!
Great post. There are lots of times where someone brings to my attention a “new” feature that has been there for a while; or even something I had forgotten about. Looking forward to what gems you reveal about Viddler that I don’t know about.
March 20th, 2008 at 10:32 am
That’s awesome! I had read about that feature on LifeHacker but when I tried it myself I couldn’t get it working. Clearly I wasn’t doing something right
March 20th, 2008 at 10:44 am
Clintus: Thanks. First we have to make them easy to find. The Simple Player should be an option in the embed panel of our player. The play all player, perhaps we could document that better on our wiki, and the JavaScript library is definitely a wiki must.
Then, perhaps some blog posts would suffice? Any ideas?
Diana: I just found it today, so don’t feel bad.
March 20th, 2008 at 10:50 am
First: Thanks for reminding me about that feature! I’ve been meaning to go looking on Google’s site for that, because I use Google Reader a lot.
Second: Better Viddler documentation would be great. I’m sure there are features that I would be using if I only knew about them (and had time to implement them/take advantage of them, of course… ah, time. there’s never enough of it).
March 20th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Chris Clark: You’ve hit the nail on the head! Time is our most valuable commodity, which is very tough to delegate properly. But we’re all trying.
March 21st, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Hey Colin, thanks for all your support of DadLabs! We love the play all player with the thumbnail filmstrip. Coolest player ever!
April 4th, 2008 at 1:01 am
For some reason the ? call doesn’t seem to work, just as of today. Has anyone else noticed this?
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:26 pm
@Peter Beck: The ? does no longer work here; approx. for 2 weeks. Using Firefox 2.0.0.14, Windows 2000. Couldn’t find anything on bugzilla.mozilla.org.