Membranophonist’s Ramblings

In the iTunes Info window:

Nisus Writer Express:

Implementation Notes

1. Hold down Command for a second or two to make the bezels appear, release it to let them fade away. A means of completely turning shortcut overlays off would be available in the System Preferences -> Universal Access -> Keyboard section.
2. Shortcut commands could be executed from the initial depression of the Command key. As with the Command-Tab application switcher, users would not need to release Command and then press it again to execute a shortcut.
3. Upon execution of a shortcut, the bezel for the activated shortcut would fade after a second while those for the non-selected shortcuts would immediately disappear. Somewhat like the menu title flashing that indicates a command within the menu has been activated via its shortcut, this would provide some visual confirmation that the shortcut has been triggered.
4. To control visual clutter (which these could definitely cause), bezels would only appear for the front-most window of the active application.
5. As you can see in the Nisus Writer mockup, this could potentially interfere with the hierarchical menu accessible by Command-clicking on the proxy icon in the window’s title bar.
6. Keyboard shortcuts would be easier to learn if Apple put the damn modifier symbols on the actual modifier keys, which is supposedly the case with non-U.S. keyboards. Why some have to suffer an inferior keyboard design while others do not is a mystery to me.

This is an evolution of my earlier Dialog Button Keyboard Shortcuts idea, which simply would not work for toolbar buttons.