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by titzer 43 days ago
The UI wouldn't be cluttered if the keys on the...keyboard...did stuff. Now that vibe-coding has broken me out of my decades-long irrational fear of GUI programming, I've recently been circling back on all the UI patterns I have just accepted. One missing one is all those F1...F12 keys. I remember those doing stuff in the DOS days. I fantasize about a computer where the menus are at the bottom of the screen and line up with the Fn keys on the keyboard. I know...it might be possible for even grandma to figure that one out.
2 comments
xp84 43 days ago
Arguably the trend to touchscreens could have given a lot of help to the novice user by having labeled buttons - onscreen FKeys if you will. But we seem to have used touchscreens to show pictures fullscreen, with controls that disappear until you swipe or touch something just the right way.

Fkeys are arguably a huge tragedy, here we have keys, twelve of them, that could have been used for simple one-fingered operation, but they were put to use pretty sparingly for a long time (basically F2 and Alt-F4 were the only common ones most people used, with F1 for Help and F11 often used for Full Screen as honorable mention) so the laptop manufacturers reused them, leading to a world where they go from being the easiest and best keyboard shortcut keys, to one of the worst, since you probably need to teach people how to find and use a 'Fn' key to use them.

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titzer 43 days ago
Touchscreen UIs definitely could be made a lot better. For example, long-press has always annoyed me. Why isn't there a modifier button that allows selecting the interaction mode before touching (e.g. a mode button separate from the thing being clicked on, that can also be clicked on with one finger)? Similarly, wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to know, before clicking, what a button might do, and whether that could be undone? Steep, steep asks, I know.
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bombcar 43 days ago
I’d love to use those keyboards that can light keys to flash the key combo for the menu items.

It seems now it’s not worth learning the keystrokes because everything is a website or changes randomly. Ah, for the days when Excel supported Lotus 1-2-3 shortcut mode for decades.

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