I love mozilla. I love mozilla for the following reasons among others:
- Type Ahead Find, now renamed Find As You Type, but it's so damn cool it doesn't really matter what they call it. Cool, because it makes browsing 10x faster for non-mouse users like me (and ex-mouse users like you), and way cooler, because it makes little text-gif-labels unnavigable (and you can't use the ALT text, because it's not visible, and there are often good reasons for the ALT not to match the image text), and therefore exposes them for the lazy, dimwitted abominations that they are.
It turns the most important factor in browsability for accessibility users (text links, text content) into a speed bonus for every user, and once it appears in IE, the textgif is dead in weeks. I've always believed that accessiblity design and good web design are the same thing, which is why accessibility ghettoes like the one that BBC News Online uses to justify abandoning their previous quality, are a mistake.
- Since I spent 20 minutes training its spam filters a month ago, I had maybe 2 spam, from about 50 a day. No false positives at all, and those 2 were ones where I had to stare hard at them to figure out what they were..
I'm trying to resist bad temptation though: it's much easier to classify a mailing list (or friend!) you're no longer interested in as spam, but that's just lazy, and if we all do it, the network will just clog up with mail that * nobody ever gets to see*
So I've had this idea to make mozilla even better.
I've actually had this idea kicking around at the back of my head since I worked in a design studio years ago and watched the paintmonkeys trying to learn keyboard shortcuts in Quark.
Keyboard shortcuts are way better (faster, less likely to cripple you) than other WIMPs elements, but they have almost zero discoverability. I've got endless lists of keyboard shortcuts for various apps pinned around my desk, but I still don't know enough.
What I would like to do:
**Add a hook into mozilla's event queue, and for every appropriate user action, if that user action has an associated shortcut, display that shortcut in the status bar.
**
It's beautifully effective:
It allows me to always look in the same place for the information, rather than having to read the A4 sheets pinned around the walls. Now it only takes a glance to learn.
It's always to hand: if I know I'm going to repeat an action 5 times, I can do the first one via the menu, and the next 4 via the keyboard. just like that. Furthermore, I can then happily forget then, knowing that the cost of discovery is going to be low next time.
I've bugzilla'd it, but I'd quite like to have a stab at it myself. My coding skills are pretty rusty, but I used to be able to do it, and this can't be that hard. The hard bit is trying to figure out where to start.
Where would one tap into the queue?
How does one write to the status bar?
I've got the book, I'll start there. This might have been a job for the lazyweb, but it looks like it doesn't scale.