Reeder and the Keyboard — Shawn Blanc

I have decided to post this again after Tumblr lost it last week.

Shawn Blanc has a look at keyboard navigation in Reeder for Mac. It’s a good analysis and worth reading if you care about this stuff. I can’t find a single sentence that I don’t agree with.

In an update, Shawn writes:

Dean Mayers points out that Reeder’s keyboard shortcuts are the same as those used by Google Reader itself on the gReader website. I, for one, never use Google Reader’s website because I can’t stand it, but I do see the logic in Reeder mimicking Google’s shortcuts.

Logical if you think of Google Reader as a service that the user interacts with. I don’t: it’s purely a back-end service for me.

This also explains why Reeder for iPhone’s up and down buttons are the ‘wrong way around’, with down on the left and up on the right. These buttons are positioned to match Google Reader’s J, K shortcuts (J is to the left of K on the keyboard). While this depends on personal preference, to me the logical orders are up then down, and left then right. That’s the way reading works in English. Hence, I say Reeder for iPhone’s buttons are ‘wrong’.