• Shift+click on the audio waveform should select from the cursor to the clicked position. This is what it does in nearly every application, and it's unexpected that it doesn't in Elan. It should work in either direction, so that clicking on the left of the cursor makes a selection starting at the click and ending at the cursor, and vice versa for clicking on the right.
  
• After making a selection by click-dragging from left to right, the cursor ends up at the right end of the selection. Pressing Shift+Space to play the selection instead starts playing rightward from the cursor, although the selection is to the left. This only occurs if the selection is not coincident with the active annotation.
  
• Also after making a selection, pressing Command+/ to move the cursor from the end of the selection to the beginning doesn't work. Pressing it a second time does work. Somehow the first keypress is being lost.
• After playing a selection, the cursor remains at the right end of the selection. In this situation pressing Shift+Space does nothing. Ideally it should play the selection again, automatically moving the cursor to the beginning of the selection first.
  
• In most applications pressing Escape clears the current selection. Instead in Elan the keypress is Alt+Shift+C which is obscure and unintuitive.
  
• Pressing Alt+Down to move to the annotation on the next lowest tier is problematic if the next lowest tier has no annotation with the same alignment as the current tier. Instead, the last annotation on the next lowest tier is selected, which may be quite distant from the current annotation. This is extremely confusing because the current location in the recording suddenly changes. Instead, at the very least nothing should happen if there is no annotation in the next lowest tier. A better solution would be to change to the next lowest annotation with the same alignment as the current in whatever tier it happens to be. Thus the current annotation might be changed to one a few tiers down, which is immediately apparent since otherwise the display has not changed. If there is no aligned annotation in any lower tier, then nothing should happen.
  
• The Shortcuts window uses the symbol ␣ (U+2423 open box) for the Space key. This is not obvious to most people, and it would be better to just use the text "Space" instead. The same is probably true for "Return" instead of ⏎ (U+23CE return symbol), "Delete" instead of ⌦ (U+2326 erase to the right, should be ⌫ U+232B erase to the left), "Page Up" instead of ⇞ (U+21DE upwards arrow with double stroke), and "Page Down" instead of ⇟ (U+21DF downwards arrow with double stroke). The arrow symbols ←↑→↓ (U+2190..U+2193) are fine.
  
• In contrast, "Command" is the name for the Mac key labeled ⌘ (U+2318 place of interest sign) but this name is not well known by many people other than hard core Mac aficionados and Mac programmers. The key is labeled with ⌘ and an Apple logo, and application menus all use ⌘. It would be more intuitive if the ⌘ symbol was used instead of "Command". ⌥ (U+2325 option key) could be used as well, since it's common in menus, but keeping "Alt" is probably okay too since all Apple keyboards are labeled with "Alt" in addition to "Option" nowadays.
• There is a small, empty tooltip (a "mouse dropping") which appears occasionally when the mouse pointer hovers over the audio waveform. This is probably an accident of something or other. I haven't figured out how to make it always appear, but it shows up relatively often. It's harmless, but should probably be looked at and fixed. Screenshot (mouse pointer automatically removed):
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Thanks for the detailed report and suggestions. Just a few remarks here, I've numbered the points:

1) Yes, Shift+Click now only works if there is already a selection. This will be extended in the way you suggest.

2-4) There are still some problems with play selection, we'll try to improve. I wasn't able to reproduce all the described phenomena; in general things should work (and mostly do) as you described.

5) It is now possible to change the shortcuts to ones liking (Edit->Preferences->Edit Shortcuts). I would hesitate overloading the Escape key too much; it is e.g. used to cancel the text edit box. Setting the Escape key for clearing the selection can result in the selection being cleared when canceling the edit box (can be system dependent).

6) Changing the Alt+Down and Alt+Up behavior makes sense to me, will look into that.

7-8) The MacOS itself uses most of the symbols like Return etc in several preference panels. Maybe it would be good to have two "modes" for the keyboard shortcut labels, symbols or text.

9)Fixed.

-Han