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WoW Rookie: Keyboard shortcuts
WoW Rookie is brought to our readers to help our newest players get acclimated to the game. Make sure you send a note to WoW Insider if you have suggestions for what new players need to know.Accept this fact: to be good at playing WoW, you need to learn to use your keyboard at least some of the time. You don't have to bail on your mouse, but it's very helpful to learn some of the very basic keyboard shortcuts that will make your life in the game that much easier. (Easy is good, right?)Using the game interfaceThere are hotkeys for almost everything you do in-game. You can find most of them by just hovering your mouse over the icons that you click -- as no doubt you may have already noticed. Let's start with the button bar that you use to bring up your Quest Log, Spellbook and other things. You'll see that when I hover my mouse over the gold cup icon, a tooltip pops up. The L in parentheses after "Quest Log" means you can just press your L key to bring up the log instead of clicking the icon. (Don't worry that it's a capital L, just press lower-case L. When a keyboard command is capitalized, it's written as "Shift-L".) After the break, you'll see a list of keyboard shortcuts for the game interface.
The Daily Grind: Who's got the best UI?
There's something to be said for a good user interface. Look at the ugly UI of Second Life, for example. Compare that to World of Warcraft, or what would have been (and might still be) Star Trek Online. Looks are important; at the very least, the interface should match the aesthetic of the world in which you're playing. But beyond that, there are other considerations.Obviously, you want to be able to quickly find the commands you're looking for, and perhaps even customize the UI to match how you think. Assignable keyboard commands are a time- and sometimes life-saver. And although its growing increasingly rare these days, sometimes monitor size and screen resolution are important too. So, when they're all stacked up against each other, who's got the best UI?
KeyCue 2.1
I am a keyboard command junkie but there are only so many shortcuts I can remember from day to day. That's why I started using KeyCue a year or so ago and I highly recommend it to anyone who relies on keyboard shortcuts but has trouble remembering the many hundreds that are available at any given time - which, face it, is most of you.KeyCue gives you an instant overview of all the menu shortcuts available to whatever application you are working in. You trigger it with the Command/Apple key and there you have all the shortcuts you need at a glance.Ergonis, the developer of KeyCue, is also the dev behind PopChar, which many of you probably already know and love. KeyCue is for keyboard menu shortcuts what PopChar is for special characters.KeyCue 2.1 is the latest update and requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or newer and it's Universal Binary. It's $20 to buy, but you can try it for free. The upgrade to 2.1 is also free for anyone who bought KeyCue in the last 2 years.
TUAW Tip: Initiate Bluetooth File Exchange with a keyboard shortcut
TUAW-lover Andrew accidentally discovered that if you select a file in the Finder and press Apple + Shift + B (aka Command+Shift+B), it brings up the Bluetooth File Exchange application and prompts you for which device you want to send the selected file(s) to.I love keyboard shortcuts and I know an awful lot of them but this is one that I either never knew or once knew but quickly forgot. Incredibly handy!Thanks, Andrew!
