This is what would happen. I’d envoke the Miniplayer by first envoking Alfred’s global keyboard shortcut, typing iTunes, and selecting the Miniplayer. Then, I’d choose one of the menu items it shows – here is an example screenshot.

This wasn’t good because the menu changes as you choose items from the list. Notice the keyboard shortcuts to play random albums or switch into Playlists, etc using CMD+2, CMD+3 and so on. The problem is that these menu items change as your context changes inside of the Miniplayer. In other words, CMD+4 would not always fire the same action. This got pretty annoying so I fired off a tweet to @alfredapp on Twitter.

And, wouldn’t you know, they responded, there is a better way! Alfred has a whole host of keyboard shortcuts that remain consistent regardless of what you’re looking at within the application. If you look at the list, scroll down to the iTunes Miniplayer section, you’ll see that you can use CMD+CNTRL+(arrow keys) to do many of the tasks that I do each and every day, and, they will always be the same no matter what.

Fantastic! Thanks Alfred. (I’ve always wanted to say that)

Glims, a plugin (read: input manager hack) for Safari, enables a lot of preferences around searching that Safari simply doesn’t have built-in. I originally installed it because I wanted to play around with Bing, Microsoft’s latest version of their search efforts. However, it came with a caveat that I can’t seem to find a solution to no matter what combination of preferences I choose. Keyboard shortcuts, such as those found in Google Reader, do not work when I have Glims installed.

So, I’ve uninstalled Glims – for now. The benefits of keyboard shortcuts in my most used Web applications outweigh those of trying out other search engines besides Google. I’ll be watching Glims for an update.

Google Reader’s Heads Up Display for Keyboard Shortcuts
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

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.