- From: Dr Geoffrey Kantaris <egk10@cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 10:40:56 -0000
- To: <www-amaya@w3.org>
Could I suggest that the Amaya team take this opportunity to rationalize the
shortcut system, since the complex ones have these problems with xwidgets?
It's a fact that most PC (and Mac) computer users today are very used to
Office-style shortcuts. We're trying to implement Amaya as a web editing
solution in the Modern Languages Faculty at Cambridge University, and users
almost universally complain that Amaya is unintuitive to use -- I think the
"foreignness" of the commands that have to be typed, (Ctrl-o+Ctrl-o to open
a file, Ctrl-i+Ctrl-e for emphasis) is largely responsible for this. I know
that users or implementers can customize the keyboard file all they want,
but for Joe Public downloading Amaya for the first time, useability would be
immensely improved if the 'standard' PC-based keymapping file followed the
most used shortcuts of, say, OpenOffice, including Ctrl-b for strong(bold),
Ctrl-i for emphasis(italics), Ctrl-o to open a file, Ctrl-a to select all,
Ctrl-w to close a window, F11 to open a dialogue for inserting CSS-style
classes, Ctrl-k to insert a hyperlink, F7 for spelling...; and then build
the other less used shortcuts around these. Above all, simple and often-used
commands (like emphasis and strong) really should have a simple one-press
short-cut as standard: it is terribly slow to type Ctrl-i+Ctrl-e just to get
emphasis.
PS We're desperate for the Mac version here! Keep up the good work!
Geoffrey
Received on Thursday, 9 December 2004 10:54:35 UTC