It’s good to see Userland adding a shortcuts capability to Radio, but the interface for doing so is horrible — all shortcuts are surrounded by quote marks.
The problem is that quote marks are frequently used characters. So what do you do if you have a shortcut that looks like this, “My Summer Vaction”, and decide at some point you just want to be able to show My Summer Vacation in quotes (i.e., not resolved as a shortcut,
Sometimes there will be a shortcut for something that you want to refer to in double-quotes without it becoming a link. You can prevent Radio from processing the shortcut by putting a backslash before each of the quotes like this: “My Summer Vacation”. More information about backslashes is here.
Ugh. How un-user friendly is that? Why not just use a relatively infrequently used character? Conversant uses the pipe character (“|”), and a whole host of other characters such as the “~” or “+” or even “^” could be used. Why settle on something as common as the quote mark and then force users to mentally maintain a list of shortcuts in their head that they need to backslash out of if they just want to show the words in quotes? (After all, how often is someone going to want to dislay +My Summer Vaction+ or ~My Summer Vaction~ — never, except when explaining how the function works, and in that case its just easier to look up the HTML character codes).