Smartphones and Search Prefixes.

When I’m playing a game on my computer, I often want to look up information about it, but I tend to use my mobile rather than tabbing out. I’ve never found touch-screen keyboards super-comfortable, usually needing to fix their mistakes when swiping, and then fix more mistakes while hunting-and-pecking a letter at a time. And half the search is typing the name of the game (the context) for the actual information I want.

It would be nice if the browser or keyboard offered some way to store search prefixes. As I’m on Android, I looked briefly into it, and it seems there is! The built-in keyboard has a clipboard, which I knew, but I didn’t realize you can pin items in it so they don’t expire after one hour.

So for the next game I play, I’ll create a pinned item there, and when I need to search, I can simply paste the context first and type my search.

It’s one of the issues of computing that surfacing options and features is very difficult. People don’t tend to learn all the keyboard shortcuts on desktop, at least partly because they don’t know them, and learning them requires practice. Or if you want to change some setting, where is it located, what is it called? I spent 20 minutes (and read at least three help forum posts) the other day figuring out where to change the number of brightness steps for the keyboard shortcuts (K for darker, L for lighter) in Krita.

The other thing a lot of tech fails to do is let you access it from a desktop. I don’t have a smartwatch, but even regular digital watches are notoriously annoying to set with their button combinations. If you could pull up a simple webpage to change their settings, it would be miles easier. That goes for most any internet-of-things style devices.

One key blocker is the connectivity piece. If it’s over WAN, that has to be configured. If it’s over Bluetooth that has its own limitations. If it’s somehow wired, that needs likely some flavor of USB. And there again, if you want it to be a web interface (which would be simplest) that needs some sort of networkable connectivity, versus some bespoke app that talks over a wire or wireless protocol (USB or Bluetooth). While there has been some implementations of web APIs for USB or Serial protocols, my understanding is those go the other way, letting a webpage accessed via the network talk to some device (and aren’t currently widely implemented). Perhaps you could have a local HTML file (plus Javascript) that could talk to your device and load most of the interface that way?

My longstanding belief is that we have a ton of technology we haven’t begun to grapple with making it actually do a lot of cool things. Some of that is lack of imagination, some is because of security concerns, and some the lack of a path to monetization. Hopefully some day we can see some big brave steps forward in tech again, rather than wasteful datacenter buildouts and cryptospeculation.