launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Sidnei da Silva <sidnei.da.silva@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 4:31 PM, Francis J. Lacoste
<francis.lacoste@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Another site that uses shortcuts very well is Remember the Milk. That one also
> uses single-key letter accelarators and display a portlet on key pages with
> common shortcuts. It also has a link to the full list.
>
> Adi's did consider using single letter short-cut, but dismissed the idea
> because in Translations there is always an input field that has the focus by
> default. And single-letter shortcuts don't work well in such an environment.
> (Do you want the shortcut or type the letter?)

Let's think outside the box then. The same happens on Gmail, when
you're composing a message, the keyboard shortcuts do not work. That's
not a bug or a missing feature IMO, but a safeguard against
accidentally losing your current work by hitting a shortcut
unintentionally.

Arguably, the same applies to Translations: if you are inside an input
field, typing something, you don't care about shortcuts. If you want
to move to the next translation, you could hit 'Esc' or 'Tab' to take
the focus away from the input field. At that point, single-key
shortcuts would work.

The way I see it, it would work like this:

- You land on the Translations page, nothing is focused.
- You hit 'j/k' to navigate up/down in the list of translations. A
focus hint is drawn around the current translation.
- You hit 'e' to start editing the focused translation. Only then the
input box gets the focus.
- Once you're done editing you hit 'Esc' to drop focus or 'Tab' to
move to the next translation.
- At that point, all shortcuts work since you're not focusing on an input field.

I would find very enjoyable to work with those shortcuts.

Special hint: It's really trivial to implement shortcut navigation
within a common set of descendant elements with YUI3's FocusManager.
I've played around with it for a specialized view in Landscape and
it's incredible!

  http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/3/node-focusmanager/

-- Sidnei