The biggest 'oh dear' moment of the whole day was when I tried to use our own (intranet) application. Indeed, this experience highlighted just how little thought I give this myself during development of an app or site. Some apps just didn't work very well mouseless. Not everything was fluffy bunnies and rainbow-coloured unicorns. Very nice indeed! Dealing with the main area of Outlook didn't prove quite as enjoyable but having looked up a very lengthly list of shortcuts, I am confident that given more time, dealing with emails and calendars without the mouse would become reasonable. It turns out that hitting F10 brings up little tooltips all over the ribbon illustrating what keys to press to pick various options. All in all though, this aspect went very well. The inability to just right-click and have a vast list of options was also noticeable. My biggest drop in productivity was actually the ability to select (and manipulate) text. Whilst working in Visual Studio, I have a set of shortcuts which I commonly use anyway and am comfortable with - these carried on as usual and I found that I actually don't really need to use the mouse a huge amount anyway. I can honestly say that Twitter was very comfortable after a short spell of acclimatisation.Īnother couple of big ticks in the awesome box came courtesy of Visual Studio partnered with ReSharper, and surprisingly from Office 2010. They both followed the convention of the j and k keys navigating the main list as well which was great, along with using ? to bring up a help screen showing just what keys to press for all the various functions. Still right at my fingertips, but no conflicts with sites' own keyboard navigation.īeing restricted to using just the keyboard soon makes it clear which sites have got their keyboard-fu right and which haven't. I decided to swap the activation keys to ` and \ instead. were less than ideal on sites like Twitter though, where it totally overrides their built-in shortcuts. I soon found that the initial activation keys of g and. It's not quite the same as browsing just with the power of your mind, but it isn't that far off. GleeBox allowed me to jump to any link on the page simply by typing (some of) it, and then follow it by hitting enter, or shift-enter for a new tab. GMail's keyboard support is pretty good as well, if a little surprising at times. I find the sensation of scrolling using either the arrow keys or page up/page down a little less tactile and involving than using a scroll wheel or my magic mouse, but sufficient. ONCE I LEARNED TO GO MOUSELESS IM HAPPIER PLUSThe combination of well-known browser shortcuts, plus gleeBox made web browsing pretty painless. My first impression as I began my day was that it wasn't all that bad. Not exactly a comprehensive set-up phase! Diving In My preparation consisted of turning on GMail keyboard shortcuts, installing gleeBox (which is awesome) and printing off a few keyboard shortcut crib-sheets. Unlike Rob, I didn't get everything ready ahead of time. The idea was that ditching the mouse and embracing the keyboard would speed everything up, make me more efficient and probably save the world. ONCE I LEARNED TO GO MOUSELESS IM HAPPIER FULLWhat's more, this was a full real-life day at work rather than just a little experiment at home. Yesterday I decided to join Rob Conery in disconnecting my hand from my mouse for ' International Mouse Freedom Day'.
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