(And all the comments about how much faster computers are today: I interpreted the article to be talking about the ease of UI, in other words how fast the interface lets you do things, not how fast the computer does things.)
I have a private Rails app I've used as a freelancer for 7-8 years for time tracking, invoicing, expenses, and financial reports, and I've tried to make it very keyboard-focused, so that I can enter info without clicking around. I've always wanted to polish it enough to share and charge money for, and I've thought a nice niche would be to double down on the "keyboard productivity" theme. But making that work well in a browser is tricky.
Do you mostly rely on browser-native functionality for keyboard nav/input? That's how it is today. It's fine for me, but it's not really "enough" I think. There are lots of other navigation moves I wish had keyboard shortcuts. But a lot of taste is required here. Usually when people override browser behavior it makes things worse (e.g. scrolling). But there are still things that would be actual improvements.
So a couple years ago I rewrote the Invoices section in React+Redux, hoping that would make it easier to do some custom UI behavior. It made a couple small things better, but it's a lot more code, and it breaks some things the browser used to give me for free. For example if you add a new invoice and see it at the bottom of the list, then you click to a non-React part of the site, then click Back, the new invoice disappears from the list! I'm not even sure how to fix that, unless I want to add a spinner and Ajax call on page load. (Right now I pass the initial state as JSON in the rendered HTML.) Maybe I could use local storage, but then somehow when you click Back I have to decide whether to trust local storage or make an Ajax call. . . .
Anyway, rather than complaining about the article, I'd be more interested in a conversation about how to build webapps with a keyboard focus, so that you can complete entire tasks without touching the mouse. What native browser features would you leverage? What frontend tech would help you? Can you imagine "standard" patterns you could encode in a JS lib, both for DRY code and for a more predictable UI? A "Bootstrap for keyboard-first webapps" would be really cool. In fact Bootstrap already does a lot for accessibility.
(And all the comments about how much faster computers are today: I interpreted the article to be talking about the ease of UI, in other words how fast the interface lets you do things, not how fast the computer does things.)
I have a private Rails app I've used as a freelancer for 7-8 years for time tracking, invoicing, expenses, and financial reports, and I've tried to make it very keyboard-focused, so that I can enter info without clicking around. I've always wanted to polish it enough to share and charge money for, and I've thought a nice niche would be to double down on the "keyboard productivity" theme. But making that work well in a browser is tricky.
Do you mostly rely on browser-native functionality for keyboard nav/input? That's how it is today. It's fine for me, but it's not really "enough" I think. There are lots of other navigation moves I wish had keyboard shortcuts. But a lot of taste is required here. Usually when people override browser behavior it makes things worse (e.g. scrolling). But there are still things that would be actual improvements.
So a couple years ago I rewrote the Invoices section in React+Redux, hoping that would make it easier to do some custom UI behavior. It made a couple small things better, but it's a lot more code, and it breaks some things the browser used to give me for free. For example if you add a new invoice and see it at the bottom of the list, then you click to a non-React part of the site, then click Back, the new invoice disappears from the list! I'm not even sure how to fix that, unless I want to add a spinner and Ajax call on page load. (Right now I pass the initial state as JSON in the rendered HTML.) Maybe I could use local storage, but then somehow when you click Back I have to decide whether to trust local storage or make an Ajax call. . . .
Anyway, rather than complaining about the article, I'd be more interested in a conversation about how to build webapps with a keyboard focus, so that you can complete entire tasks without touching the mouse. What native browser features would you leverage? What frontend tech would help you? Can you imagine "standard" patterns you could encode in a JS lib, both for DRY code and for a more predictable UI? A "Bootstrap for keyboard-first webapps" would be really cool. In fact Bootstrap already does a lot for accessibility.