It’s Shortcut Sumo: The Biggest, Baddest Collection of Adobe Keyboard Shortcuts Ever!

It’s big. It’s bad. It’s here — Shortcut Sumo, a brand-new ebook from “The Photoshop Guys” at the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) [Matt, RC, Corey, Pete, and me] with quick, easy access to all the Mac and PC keyboard shortcuts for Adobe Camera Raw, Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign and Illustrator and it’s available NOW for the iPad.

Here’s the Scoop:
If there was ever an idea that works as an ebook, this is it because to do the book the way I envisioned it, you really couldn’t do it as a printed book — it would literally be thousands of pages; as thick as a phone book and nobody would ever buy it at the price you’d need to charge. That’s because I really felt this book would need to have two very specific features:

(1) I wanted just one shortcut per page. That’s right — just one, but with some bonuses, like a screen capture of what the shortcut is for, a full keyboard visually showing just that one the shortcut, and a brief sentence that explains the shortcut.

(2) If you use a Mac, you should only see Mac keyboards shortcuts. Same with a PC. So, when you first launch the App, you tap on Mac or PC, and from then on, you only see the shortcuts for the platform you chose (but you can change your mind, anytime). That means creating a separate page for every Mac shortcut, and another for every PC shortcut. Way too costly to do in print, but perfect for an eBook.

But today’s ebook format didn’t give me quite what we needed
The standard ebook format (used by everyone from Apple’s iBooks store to Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and so on), doesn’t allow you to type in a word and have it search through the book, and with a book of keyboard shortcuts, we felt it would be important to be able to search using a key word, so that was one of the reasons we decided to make the book an App, rather than a standard ePub book found in the iBook store.

A small kink in the plan
It’s always something, right? In this case, it happens when you key word search — at this point in the development of the App, the search results bring up both the PC and Mac shortcuts (not just the shortcuts for the platform you chose at the beginning). So, as long as you’re looking through the contents pages to find the shortcut you’re looking for, it stays platform specific. If you type in a search term, you get both. Not a deal breaker, but it’s not exactly the way we wanted it to work, but it gives us something to work on going forward.

Since it’s an App, now we can add video, right?
Right! We included a short video at the start of each program where we each share a few of our favorite tips. The tips are good, the presentation is…well…we very loosely kept with the theme [wink]. Check out RC in the screen cap above and you’ll see what I mean.

How much does it cost?
The Shortcut Sumo App is FREE and comes with the shortcut module for Adobe Camera Raw. Additional Modules are $2.99 each, and the module for Photoshop CS6 is already available for download right from the App (we’re just finishing up other shortcut modules for Lightroom, InDesign, and Adobe illustrator, which when added to the Camera Raw and Photoshop, they form the “Biggest, Baddest Collection of Adobe keyboard shortcuts ever!” [insert gong sound here].

I hope you’ll check it out today (especially since the Camera Raw module is free). Here’s the link to Shortcut Sumo on the iTunes store, and of course you can just search for “Shortcut Sumo” on your iPad in the App Store. Hope you like and find it useful.