ShortcutGuide Blog

Who’s amung us service added

July 14, 2008 – 11:54 pm
Who's amung us is an interesting site that gathers live user data (geo IP) about users on a current web page.  I've implemented their service on the site to let users know how many people are looking at the same shortcut page, what's most popular, and where are people coming from.  This service might create more of a community feel for ShortcutGuide users, let me know your thoughts.

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Site Feedback

July 14, 2008 – 9:57 pm
If you're interested in provided feedback about ShortcutGuide, please post comments below, or join the discussion Free-Space.Net.   I've already made some changes to the site based on the feedback I recieved.

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Faster Tabbed browsing, Publisher Pages and Recently Added

July 13, 2008 – 8:07 pm
Faster tabbed browsing: You should notice a significantly better response time when using tabbed browsing (the results are no longer fetched live from the server each time a new tab is clicked). Publisher pages: Shortcut results pages now have a link to see all the keyboard shortcuts from the publisher/vendor.  For example, if you are viewing Access 2007 keyboard shortcuts, you can click on Microsoft, and see all the shortcuts from Microsoft. Recently Added: At the bottom of the home page and the publisher pages, the top 10 recently added application shortcuts will appear.

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Broke 200 applications mark

July 12, 2008 – 11:32 am
ShortcutGuide now has over 200 applications with keyboard shortcuts and over 7500 shortcuts themselves (roughly 37 shortcuts per application). The next major milestone is to break 10K shortcuts on the site, and we're 75% there. If you want to help us out, add some shortcuts to applications that we're missing. If we don't have an application you use put it into our site, someone else will enter the shortcuts. I would recommend that independent software developers would at least put in the name of their application.

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Google Experimental Search

July 11, 2008 – 2:12 am
Google is working on some innovative ways to represent information and navigate search results. They have three experimental versions of their interface (Alternate views for search results, Keyword suggestions, and Keyboard shortcuts). Using shortcuts to navigate search results is heavenly. You can go to previous and next search results similar to Gmail (using J and K keys, respectively) and use the forward slash (/) to place the focus into the search field. Also, if you continue to hit the J key, you are automatically sent to the next page of results, no more clicking numbers 1 to N. I hope they make this feature permanent on the main page. ShortcutGuide list of Google Experimental Search Keyboard Shortcuts

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Keyboard Shortcuts Star Rating Feature

July 7, 2008 – 12:59 am
Why reinvent the wheel? Since ShortcutGuide was started about a year and a half ago, there has always been a desire to put in more filtering mechanisms so that users can easily find the "most useful"/"highest utility" keyboard shortcuts. A quick and dirty approach was using JS-Kit Ratings. After running the service on the site for several days, I can summarize the pros and cons Advantages: Simple to implement Great UI Offload bandwidth/processing Disadvantages Lack of control Availability (downtime) After weighing the options, I decided against the solution because of control of data (e.g., they hold all the data within their database to reduce complexity). The ratings feature was put on the back burner for several months until today, when I was researching a solution that would provide all of the features I was looking for. The best rating system I found was written by Jordan Boesch, AJAX star rating. This AJAX script is ...

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Broke 100 applications mark

July 3, 2008 – 2:25 am
A day or so ago, ShortcutGuide broke the 100 applications mark (watch the stats).  This is a relatively large accomplishment since we started in December of 2006 with our first application (gmail).  Gmail keyboard shortcuts stayed on the front page and was later replaced by Vista keyboard shortcuts, subsequently the main page is now more informational.  We hope to break the 1000 mark, ten times what we have by the end of the year.  We hope to grow our information base though a variety of techniques; if you are a developer and want to add shortcuts to your own application on ShortcutGuide, just click Add Shortcuts.

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Hosting upgrade

July 1, 2008 – 10:31 pm
The site was down for an hour or so today as we upgraded the current hosting plan.  ShortcutGuide is now on a virtual private server instead of shared hosting.  There is a significant performance increase in page load time.  Additionally, instead of static HTML pages that were pre-generated, we've gone to completely real time database driven site; updates to shortcuts should be seen immediately instead of a 24 hour waiting period.

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Main site refresh - Introducing Tabbed Shortcuts

June 29, 2008 – 1:41 am
No need to fear for those that love the Virtual Keyboard--it's still accessible.  There are several updates to the main page 1) All shortcuts are now tabular (based on categories).  The default is "All," but you can filter as you like 2) Upper right hand corner is an Add This button, you can share on any major social networking site, or just add the current page as your favorites. 3) Virtual Keyboard can still be accessed via the link next to the name of the shortcuts 4) search function is minimized to have more retail space for the current page. 5) Because of these changes the load time of the site has improved as well.  Any feedback is appreciated (info at shortcutguide dot com) -mike

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Add Shortcuts AutoComplete

June 29, 2008 – 1:40 am
The most difficult problem facing ShortcutGuide is data acquisition (sourcing).  If we can create a UI that allows people to enter shortcuts faster, I would venture to guess that more people would 1) enter in  shortcuts 2) enter more of them.  Hence the UI change below.  When Adding Shortcuts to the site, you have to select the publisher/company. Previously there was a drop down, but a AutoComplete seems more natural in this context.  Additionally, if the company isn't there, now there's a simple button at the bottom to add a new one.

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