Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

When popular websites change their layout & design, it takes time for users to get accustomed to it. If you don't like frills and rather like features that get your work done faster, explore keyboard shorcuts that web apps like Twitter, Gmail, Google Reader, Google Docs offer. Just hit the question mark (?) key while you are logged into one of those sites and you will see a popup with a list of all supported hotkeys. While the keyboard shortcut Help popup has been in GMail & Google Reader since a couple of years now, I came to know about the Twitter hotkeys today from Scott Hanselman's blog.

I found the choice of letters used by Twitter hotkeys more intuitive than what Google has (how easy is it to correlate Sneak Peak with the letter "h"?)

... so I identified for myself a list of shortcuts that are easily memorable from the much larger list:

• g then i : Go to Inbox
• g then s : Go to Starred conversations
• g then t : Go to Sent messages
• g then d : Go to Drafts
• g then a : Go to All mail
• g then c : Go to Contacts
• g then k : Go to Tasks
• g then l : Go to Label
• u : Back to threadlist
• k / j : Newer/older conversation
• o or or <Enter> : Open conversation; collapse/expand conversation
• c : Compose
• / : Search
• ? : Open shortcut help
• ! : Report as spam
• # : Move to bin
• r : Reply
• <Shift> + r : Reply in a new window
• a : Reply all
• <Shift> + a : Reply all in a new window
• f : Forward
• <Shift> + f : Forward in a new window
• z : Undo last action
• g then w : Create a blank document
• h : Sneak peek
• <Shift> + t : Add conversation to Tasks
• <Tab> then <Enter> : Send mail
• . : Open more actions menu
• <Ctrl> + s : Save draft

The ? hotkey Help shortcut popup is an interesting UI Pattern that other web apps should start using as well.

Just as browsers have almost standardized on keyboard shortcuts, it will be good for users if web sites standardize helpful features like the keyboard shortcuts Help popup and maintain similar mappings.

Here's a list of sites that support keyboard shortcuts (those supporting the ? hotkey Help shortcut popup are shown in bold):

• Twitter
• Gmail
• Google Reader
• Google Docs 
• Yahoo
• Remember The Milk
• Hotmail

The Wife finally cracked the mystery of how to take a screenshot of any screen on her Samsung Omnia 652.

For months since she saw the message "Screen captured. Saved as image file" while trying to unlock the smartphone, we were intrigued what key combination had led to it. We turned to Google but found no answers and this was too trivial to ask on online forums.

It's finally a relief to know that the combination is Alt+*+Confirm/OK key
You can access the screenshot by going to the Images folder in My Documents that you can find under Contents Manager. 


A few other tricks we discovered (after we didn't find them in the manual):
While composing a text message, press the Shift key (up arrow on the extreme left of bottom row) twice to type everything in capitals and if you need to type only numbers, press the Alt key twice.

The Sym (Symbol) key lets you activate the XT9 option, the predictive text feature that helps in typing words faster. XT9 & T9 are typically found on phones made by LG, NEC, Nokia, Samsung Electronics, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, Sanyo, Sagem.

One of our favorite camera features on the Omnia is the Multi shot option that lets you take a series of photos of an action with a single click.

Also see:
Save time while typing with PhraseExpress