I’ve written a blog post about the most important technological issue of our time - why every streaming service has its own weird keyboard.
QWERTY should’ve been retired with the typewriter. It makes zero logical sense to use on touch screen let alone remote. Familiarity isn’t a good enough reason.
As much as I agree with the argument for QWERTY agaist Dvorak or Colemark as a default, alphabetical ordering seems more generally standard than even QWERTY. And in any case, when typing something on the TV the remote seems to be the real bottleneck.
I don’t really mind the alphabetical order. As others have already mentioned not everyone knows QWERTY, but most people know the alphabet.
The worst layout I’ve seen is where all the letters are in a single row. I think AppleTV is like this and I feel like I’ve seen it with at least one or two other services. But at least with AppleTV I can usually use my phone as a keyboard if I’m typing more than a couple characters.
It would be nice if there was a consistent layout that all the apps would use.
Yeah those keyboard layouts are TERRIBLE! Takes forever to type anything and I usually make mistakes too. Now I use AppleTVs and as soon as I open a search field my iPhone pops up a keyboard to type instead of using the remote, or I can use the Siri Remote to dictate the phrase. Still would prefer a QWERTY layout though.
The text input pop-up on iPhones when using an Apple TV really is one of the best features I’ve encountered in streaming-land.
As a full time colemak user, QWERTY really does my head in these days. I regress to a one-finger typist every time!
Interesting blog post. Yea, those a-z layouts are really weird. They remind me of the text input the old Pokémon games had. On Smart TV’s I always try to avoid using the keyboard if it is possible to type the input on my phone.
What about Youtube and HBO Max?
I would go as far to say don’t use on screen keyboards at all. Use an app. I know they have to have something for those who don’t have smart phones but Chromecast is a breeze to use compared to every other smart TV I’ve had to deal with.
Have to respectfully disagree on this. For typing purposes, QWERY is indeed better, but if you’re using a remote’s up-down-left-right buttons, I feel a-z feels more familiar.
I disagree. Gaming consoles typically have qwerty layout for on-screen typing with a D-pad. I still think it’s faster to input when I know where the letters are. With different services adopting different alphabetical layouts, I don’t quickly know where the letters are. Really, the best solution would be to make it an option. I always end up casting from my phone which allows me to use my phone’s keyboard.
As a colemak user, I would prefer abc instead of qwerty
As a Dvorak user, I agree.
This has never bothered me before but it has now, thanks
As a Dvorak user, Dvorak is pretty terrible for single-finger typing since the focus is on hand-alternation. If I had the choice I’d probably choose this.
There have been layouts developed for single or limited-finger use and I think it’s a shame they never caught on.
It really is a nightmare, and even worse when you have to log into a service that doesn’t have a “sign in on another device by entering this one time code” offering, and worse still when you use a password manager and your password is a long string of random characters. In this scenario, I’ve gone so far as to ADB into my device and use
adb shell input "whatever I would have had to type on the TV", which somehow feels faster.My last two devices, the fancy new Chromecast 4K, and then an Nvidia Shield, both use Google’s regular keyboard when it can and is nicer in comparison. Still many streaming apps force you to use the built-in alphabetic keyboards instead of using the one provided by the OS.
I’m surprised I never really noticed this, but it explains why my brain freezes up for a moment every time I go to search for something in a streaming service, haha. Very odd, very unintuitive!
Voice wins by a mile here
i hate talking to the tv or any device
