Recently, after a flurry of annoying user interface issues, I’ve switched my
RSS reader from Liferea to Google
Reader. Interestingly, it turns out that Google
Reader actually fits better with the traditional UNIX user interface concept,
I’ve found.
What triggered this was an upgrade from Liferea 1.0.x to 1.4.4 as part of
Ubuntu Gutsy; this brought with it a lot
of changed behaviours, such as ‘drag-and-drop of feed URL to HTML view no
longer
subscribes’,
and one crucial UI issue, ‘”Skim through articles” only works with
ctrl+space’.
I’ve been a long-time UNIX user, dating back to the days where
curses-based interfaces were the norm.
As such, I tend to drive commonly-used applications using keyboard commands
where possible. (This isn’t a purely UNIX thing; Windows has the
phenomenon of the keyboard-wielding “power user”, too.)
Liferea was attractive, since it offered the ability to skim through articles
quickly by just pressing the “Space” key; simply press space to page down, or
to skip to the next unread article if at the end of the current one.
Unfortunately, Liferea 1.4.x breaks this, and it wasn’t going to be fixed,
since apparently a GNOME app shouldn’t behave this way:
GTK explicitely does implement as a key binding for several of it’s
widgets. Rebinding means to break the default behaviour for such
widgets (tree views, buttons, input fields). [....] Liferea as a web-browsing
application should behave like any other web browser and like every other
GNOME/GTK application as much as possible.
Now, I don’t know if it’s GNOME’s fault, or what, but for a UNIX desktop
app to break with UNIX UI conventions, that’s a bad move in my opinion.
I gave it a bit of argument in the bug tracker, but eventually gave up as I clearly
wasn’t getting anywhere. :(
Instead, based on recommendation from friends, I gave Google Reader a try, and
quickly figured out its extensive collection of keyboard
shortcuts.
Now, I’m skimming through my feeds in even less time than it took with Liferea,
simply by hitting “ga” to go to my “all unread items” list, then “j”, “j”, “j”
to skip through the postings one by one. Sweet!
It’s interesting to note that other Google web apps use the same concepts;
Gmail also has a hefty
set, and can be
driven using them in a manner very reminiscent of the classic UNIX mailreader,
Mutt. So, despite being designed with end-users in mind
by extremely clever professional user experience
designers, these apps still find space for power-user
keyboard operation. Take note, GNOME.
Anyway, I’m not too bothered. Google Reader brings other benefits, such as
fixing this bug: ‘please add ability to go to previous entry in Unread
feed’,
avoiding ‘constant memory leak requires daily
restarts’,
and, of course, the utility of being able to track the same set of feeds and
keep track of which items I’ve read in two places (work and home).
If only it was open source ;)
Tags: gmail, gnome, google, google-reader, keyboard, liferea, power-users, user-experience, user-interface
