IF YOU’RE a Twitter user – and you use the service through Twitter.com – you may have noticed a usability glitch with the site this evening.
Twitter’s upgraded its web-based service to include a series of keyboard shortcuts – such as hitting the full-stop key to display any new tweets, or pressing the G and R keys to display the tweets in which you’re mentioned.
This is automatically displayed if you hit ? – which, for most of us, is by hitting Shift and the forward-slash key, or /.
There’s one significant flaw with the new feature, though. If you have the ‘Connect’ page open, and try to write a response to somebody, you can’t stick in a ? – because it brings up the keyboard shortcuts pane.
This isn’t the case if you’re on the general Twitter homepage – if you’re typing a new tweet there, you’re able to put in a ? without hassle – but if you’re in ‘Connect’, as busier users might be in order to interact with others, or if you’re viewing a person’s full profile, you’ll have difficulty putting a ? into a response – and even into a direct message.
Thankfully – for Windows users, at least – there’s a way around this. If you hold down the Alt button to the left of the space bar, and type the number 63 on the keypad to the right of your keyboard, you can bring up the ? key without triggering the prompt.
If you’re on a laptop this could be tricky – as you might need to also use your Fn button to type the 63 by using some of the letter keys on your keypad. This is because the Alt trick doesn’t work with the usual row of numbers at the top of the screen.
For Mac users, however, we can’t find an alternative keyboard-based way of bringing up the ? symbol – meaning you’ll have to revert either to copying-and-pasting it from elsewhere.
We’re assuming Twitter will have corrected the flaw fairly quickly – but it’s a significant error for a site with such high aspirations.
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