[...] Twhirl gets the win here with a box big enough to see your whole tweet, has twitpic, and a built-in URL shortener.  And I just discovered during this post that the filter box is a nifty little search box.  No contest on this one for me.  I cannot use Twitterrific for updating because I can’t see my entire post.  And while CMD-D on my Mac is easy enough to remember, the rest of the keyboard shortcuts in Twitterrific are negated because I can’t remember them (see Whitney’s post on keyboard shortcuts.)  [...]

It would seem most sensible to use the accessibility standard of access keys to initiate shortcut commands. (shift+letter).

This I believe is the approach that google take and makes most sense from a standards and progressive enhancement point of view. The use of Ctrl+key is likely to iterfere with the browser.

Developers however need to be careful that the use of the shift key doesn’t interfere with typing, as nothing is more infuriating than trying to type something with a cap only to jump somewhere else in the page or fire some random function.

Interesting post..

When we decided on keyboard shortcuts for Alertle (www.alertle.com), a new web-based RSS feed reader, we focused on “intuitiveness”.

For example, to move up/down between headlines, simply use the up/down arrow. And to scroll up/down while reading an article, use pgup/pgdown. The way the application was designed and its layout helped in that.

But I think Google Reader can’t have up/down arrow as its keyboard shortcut for moving between the headlines because they use it to scroll on the page! Thus they have “j”, “k” for it..

Check out a comparison between Alertle and Google Reader at this link: http://blog.alertle.com/?p=10

Full list of Alertle’s shortcuts are here: http://wiki.alertle.com/doku.php/hotkeys