No Keyboard for Webapps
Posted by Vincent Woo Sat, 30 Sep 2006 00:04:00 GMT
The WASD keys would have been great for directional panning in this webapp project I’m working on. Problem is that they’re already assigned to browser functions in Opera. Since I need to find replacement cluster of keys to assign to, I quickly scraped together a map of available keys to visually plan out the keyboard layout. It doesn’t include most keys used in form widgets or key combinations.
Other than the apostrophe key, Firefox and IE assigned keys are a small subset of Opera’s and they don’t include letters or numbers. In other words, only Opera has taken all the choice assignments leaving few key options for webapps.
How will I proceed? I might try overriding assigned keys if the functionality is irrelevant for the webapp but I doubt that is a viable option most of the time. In the meantime though, I’m only going to emphasize mouse-based interactions but leave in unintuitive keyboard shortcuts for worst case scenarios.