Why make arrow keys work differently in Newsblur than every other website?
Stealing standard controls and changing how they work is a bad user experience!
I like Newsblur and hope to replace Google Reader with it. But this is one of my main two gripes.
I would prefer to be able to use the old Google Reader keyboard shortcuts (I’m mainly missing v to ‘view original’ and m to ‘mark unread’) but arrow keys are the only keyboard navigation change that is just plain wrong and not just a personal preference.
While I’d like ‘v’ it is really just a matter of preference. It is a change I could get used to. I will never get used to the arrow keys acting weirdly for one website.
You can use the left and right arrow keys to switch the view in Newsblur, and ‘o’ opens the story in a new tab. I’ve mostly grown accustomed to using o, but sometimes mess up and hit v. But the up/down arrow key thing? Yeah. That will never stop bothering me.
(Also that spacebar only moves the page up like 1/3 at a time… it’s always REALLY hard to re-find my place in the post since the amount of movement is neither marked nor obvious.)
We have j/k and n and page up and page down but unless you use a mouse (which, lets be honest, most of us use laptops) there’s no easy way to scroll. So if I get to a longer story I have to scrolls with my trackpad. It’d be A LOT easier to just use the up and down arrow keys, like every other website.
Sam fixed this, now it’s a setting. Click the gear icon in the bottom left, then choose preferences. Click the keyboard page, and you’ll see the setting the change the up and down arrow behavior there.
Thanks for the quick response. Looks like the fix is in there now. I don’t (yet) have the premium account, I plan on getting it in the next week or two though so that’s a HUGE improvement.
Sam, is there any way for me to completely disable Newsblur’s interpretation of the arrow keys? The problem I’m having lately is when holding down the arrow keys to scroll a paragraph or so, the down commands queue up (since you are presumably interpreting the string of down commands, but not stopping all action once I release the down key) and it keeps scrolling after I lift the key up.
The preference helps a little, but only if I press/depress the key multiple times instead of holding it down, which is somewhat less than ideal
I agree, but I think this might be better labelled as a bug with the up/down arrow JavaScript code. Instead of removing the functionality, a new keydown event could cancel the previous one, or something along those lines.
Yeah, that’s almost certainly a solution. I am, in general, not a fan of hijacking a key/click’s standard behaviors, which is why I prefer a way to get rid of it all together (even if it is a userscript I have to install or something)
Try setting the space bar to 10% and holding it down. I think it’s just a bug with the arrow keys that I’ve fixed with the space bar. I’ll give it a fix today.
