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Cheat Sheeter / Re: Finally, a robust keyboard shortcut app!
« Last post by mouser on June 02, 2005, 10:43 AM »great comments dragonrider.
yes i think the winkey idea may just die; having a single global hotkey to toggle the window is probably best. so hit it once to show, and again to hide. hotkey will be user-configurable of course.
i will also add the ability to dock it to the side of the screen and do that old autohide thing, so you can move mouse up to top of screen to cause it to drop into view and automatically get out of the way. could be fun.. we'll have to see.
i agree, simply having a tab for each cheat sheet is not going to work when there might be 100 of them or more. a drop down list might be more appropriate, or a menu bar with categories might be best, again we'll have to experiment and see..
detecting current application will be flexible, and will be able to look for patterns in window titlebars or owner exe's. i think we should be able to do a good job of it.
i agree it should be easy to switch to system wide info, etc.
maybe tabs might be useful in switching between "open" cheat sheets? so that you could have a couple of your favorite ones "open" but on inactive tabs? alternatively, what i was originally thinking was that you might have multiple panels, one for current application help and one for system wide cheats/hints. but maybe the idea of being able to choose a set of cheat sheets using a tab (or drop down) would be better.
transparency im going to have to play with; i'm in the camp that typically finds it not particularly useful and is confused by it - you're suggestion of having it visible by not the focus of keyboard input (so that you could still send hotkeys to the current program sounds intriguing but difficult). this might be better suited for if we set the cheat sheet panel to dock to the side of the screen while working in the other app.. we'll have to experiment.
i think using html is the best bet in terms of flexibility. as you say, writing an html editor is way outside the scope of this project, but there is a built in html editor activex with windows that i could use for minor tweaking. i do agree though that the primary focus of this tool will be to display cheat sheets for programs, where the cheat sheets have been written by OTHER PEOPLE, who are more comfortable editing html.
ie we won't expect everyone with ultraedit to write their own cheat sheet, but rather that one or two people will write one, and users can pick which one they like best.
but advanced users who customize their hotkeys will want to be able to make minor modifications to reflect their custom hotkeys, so a minor editing feature for such things would be highly desired. or at minimum a button to launch an external html editor.
one of the downsides to the flexibility of html is that it will inevitably make it harder for end users to edit the cheat sheets, as compared to if every cheat sheet was a simple text list of hotkey , feature pairs.
maybe we can write a little wizard like helper to get the best of both worlds later.
we will also want to establish some guidelines for suggested appearance of cheat sheets and a css style guide so that there is some consistency between most cheat sheets (though writers could ignore this if they wanted).
lets remember that we are talking about cheat sheet not just hotkey lists; a cheat sheet could contain other things besides hotkey tables, such as mini guides to doing certain things, etc. so it might be nice to be able to be able to design like a "cheat sheet set" for an application; essentially a group of pages that the user could view. but now it sounds like we are talking about full fledged help files.. have to be careful to keep it simple, after all the object is to provide a quick easy to read screen of info to help remind user what they need to know, not replace a full fledged help file.
yes i think the winkey idea may just die; having a single global hotkey to toggle the window is probably best. so hit it once to show, and again to hide. hotkey will be user-configurable of course.
i will also add the ability to dock it to the side of the screen and do that old autohide thing, so you can move mouse up to top of screen to cause it to drop into view and automatically get out of the way. could be fun.. we'll have to see.
i agree, simply having a tab for each cheat sheet is not going to work when there might be 100 of them or more. a drop down list might be more appropriate, or a menu bar with categories might be best, again we'll have to experiment and see..
detecting current application will be flexible, and will be able to look for patterns in window titlebars or owner exe's. i think we should be able to do a good job of it.
i agree it should be easy to switch to system wide info, etc.
maybe tabs might be useful in switching between "open" cheat sheets? so that you could have a couple of your favorite ones "open" but on inactive tabs? alternatively, what i was originally thinking was that you might have multiple panels, one for current application help and one for system wide cheats/hints. but maybe the idea of being able to choose a set of cheat sheets using a tab (or drop down) would be better.
transparency im going to have to play with; i'm in the camp that typically finds it not particularly useful and is confused by it - you're suggestion of having it visible by not the focus of keyboard input (so that you could still send hotkeys to the current program sounds intriguing but difficult). this might be better suited for if we set the cheat sheet panel to dock to the side of the screen while working in the other app.. we'll have to experiment.
i think using html is the best bet in terms of flexibility. as you say, writing an html editor is way outside the scope of this project, but there is a built in html editor activex with windows that i could use for minor tweaking. i do agree though that the primary focus of this tool will be to display cheat sheets for programs, where the cheat sheets have been written by OTHER PEOPLE, who are more comfortable editing html.
ie we won't expect everyone with ultraedit to write their own cheat sheet, but rather that one or two people will write one, and users can pick which one they like best.
but advanced users who customize their hotkeys will want to be able to make minor modifications to reflect their custom hotkeys, so a minor editing feature for such things would be highly desired. or at minimum a button to launch an external html editor.
one of the downsides to the flexibility of html is that it will inevitably make it harder for end users to edit the cheat sheets, as compared to if every cheat sheet was a simple text list of hotkey , feature pairs.
maybe we can write a little wizard like helper to get the best of both worlds later.
we will also want to establish some guidelines for suggested appearance of cheat sheets and a css style guide so that there is some consistency between most cheat sheets (though writers could ignore this if they wanted).
lets remember that we are talking about cheat sheet not just hotkey lists; a cheat sheet could contain other things besides hotkey tables, such as mini guides to doing certain things, etc. so it might be nice to be able to be able to design like a "cheat sheet set" for an application; essentially a group of pages that the user could view. but now it sounds like we are talking about full fledged help files.. have to be careful to keep it simple, after all the object is to provide a quick easy to read screen of info to help remind user what they need to know, not replace a full fledged help file.
