Hitting ‘?’ at anytime during your use of Google Reader will display this, what I think is an, incredible HUD for Reader’s keyboard shortcuts.
Google Reader’s Heads Up Display for 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.