Thursday, April 16, 2009

Key Tips - Revit 2010

A few people have commented on a "new" feature in Revit 2010, called Key Tips. They display when you press the ALT key on the keyboard. They make it possible to use the keyboard to access Ribbon tabs and panel items while working feverishly.


While they are displayed differently are they really "new"? Windows has always supported this technique to access menu items. The premise for them was, "what if your mouse stopped working or worse, you don't have a mouse?". These gave us a way to save and gracefully get out of an application without a pointing device. Literally a hold over from DOS pre-mouse computing.

Yes Key Tips are a good thing...but "new"? What is the saying? "Everything old is new again"?

2 comments:

deesee said...

Isn't what's new the fact that they all "display" at the same time when you press the alt key?

Steve said...

The way they display is new but in the past the menu items displayed an Underline beneath the letter that could be used in combination with the ALT key. So it isn't really a new idea, just a new way to display it since there isn't a "menu" anymore, except a ribbon is really just a bigger fancier "menu" after all?