Step on the Accelerator

It's clear from the responses to my U and I Need to Talk post a couple months ago that the number one complaint of the community is keyboard navigation issues.  This is actually a surprising revelation because having started out on character based systems myself I understand the benefits of keyboard navigation and spent years trying to convince windows users to work that way.  All those efforts were for naught.  No one ever took that advice and a couple years ago I threw my hands up on that cause. Now here I am getting an avalanche of feedback that users want better keyboard navigation on our application!

I'd like to make some progress on this issue, but we need your help.  Here's how:

First, we have a pretty large application with thousands of fields and buttons.  We need specific feedback on where the problems reside from every day users.  We need bug reports from you all when you run into these things.  Here's some examples of both bad and good bug reports:

• Bad
  • Buttons are often missing accelerator keys
  • Many windows have duplicate accelerator keys. 
• Good
  • "There is no accelerator key for the "Receive All" button on the Enter Receipt window"
  • "The Post and Print buttons share the same accelerator key on the Enter Receipt window"

(Note I've already found and fixed these two problems in 3.5 )

Second, while these kinds of problems are easy to fix and we like fixing easy things, it would really, really help if folks actually submitted patches.  The great thing is often these problems are as easy to fix as spelling problems.  You don't need to be a programmer to do it.   You can just find the errant C++ or .UI file, fix the accelerator and attach it to the issue.  (Fixing an accelerator usually just means putting and '&' in front of the letter you want to key off of.).

We will formally be announcing haxTuple, the second official xTuple Bug Derby, next week.  Accelerator key fixes would be a great way for community members to run up their numbers... and possibly win the grand prize that will be announced.

So let's step on the accelerator and get this stuff fixed!

John