Weeks of burning the candle at both ends have finally caught up with me. I’m just BEAT. That said, I still have enough energy to belt out one more rant before I go under the covers with my wife and one or two dogs.

1) Every website with sequential pages should have a keyboard shortcut to navigate the pages. A really good example of this is WordPress. I should be able to hit “n” to go to the next article or “p” to go to the previous article. CTRL + T should take me to the top of the listings and g + h should take me to the root of the site. In this day and age that’s not too hard to accomplish. Google Reader does it pretty well. Other sites do some subset of this sort of keystroke navigation. Most if not all desktop applications have been doing this for years. If enterprise is ever to take a liking to web applications this sort of basic functionality needs to be the standard, not the exception.

2) Macros!!! OK, so I know it’s a HUGE security risk to enable some sort of macro language for web applications but again I think that web applications will eventually need to add this functionality to compete with desktop applications. How hard would it be to include some version of Selenium into basic MS Office-like applications to give them the added boost that macros on the desktop affords power users.

3) And then there was true compatibility… Yesterday I tried to upload several long and heavily formated MS-Word documents to Google Documents. Most of the pictures, table and formatting were lost. I figured (as I always do) I did something wrong so I uploaded them again. Same shitty import. These documents had boxes, pictures and some styling attached. If Almighty Google can’t get this working then I see no long term hope for web applications replacing desktop applications. To me that’s a sad, sad thing to ponder.

Usually I’m about a month late in posting my rants. By the time I blog about my peeves, Google or someone has already addressed it. Apparently this time I’m not so far behind the demand curve with my rantings.