Embed Notice

every time i have to type something in on a TV with an on-screen keyboard i'm amazed that it still sucks as much now as it did five, ten, fifteen years ago.

how has nobody thought of anything better than moving a cursor around to click individual letters? how have some interfaces made it worse by using five rows of alphabetically ordered keys?

i've watched my parents hit "search" instead of space on android TV's youtube keyboard multiple times. i've done it myself multiple times. i've hit "clear" instead of "search" at least twice.

the PSP had qwerty or T9. T9 with a d-pad sucks, but it at least sucks a bit less. the PS5 has qwerty or qwerty with motion controls.

nearly ten years ago, steam input gave us the daisy wheel keyboard. yesterday, i typed "evil" and hit search on my xbox controller, because scrolling through pages of games with "evil" in their names to find the one i was looking for was a more appealing prospect than typing "the evil within" on that God awful on-screen keyboard.

dumb phones gave us T9. PDAs gave us handwriting recognition. smartphones gave us swipe typing. TVs gave us an experience so painful that there's an app to connect your phone to your TV just so you can use its keyboard instead of the TV's.

if LG can make their remote a wiimote, and google can put a microphone and speaker in theirs, and everyone can find the space for a fucking netflix button, why can nobody put some sort of typing interface on a TV remote?

if an xbox or playstation or switch controller has fifteen buttons and two analogue sticks and a d-pad, why does typing have to be limited to moving a cursor around a qwerty board?

xbox has a feature where you can PIN protect your account, and you enter your pin by using ten different buttons on the controller to input the ten different digits. that way, nobody can see what you're typing as you're typing it. that's genuinely clever design! why didn't they spend some of that brainpower on the fucking keyboard!!!