The grievous design problem that makes us all look like lunatics.
OK, let’s stipulate that the lady in Utah who allegedly killed her husband and then wrote a children’s book about how to talk to kids about their father’s death sucks. She shouldn’t have done that! However, there is one, and only one, issue on which I can sympathize with Kim Richins: Her insane Google searches look just like mine.
No, no, I’m not searching for “luxury poisons for the rich.” But my Google searches, like hers, are lousy with periods. According to prosecutors’ filings this week as they urged the judge to deny bail, internet searches found on her phone included “what is a lethal.does .of.fetanayl” and “how to.permanently delete information from an iphone remotely.” I, too, somehow end up typing searches into my phone that are full of periods where I wanted there to be spaces, as if I’m William Shatner, emphasizing.each.word.I.type. My recent searches include:
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cold.weather.gear sky.island nick.horby times.london.lorrie.moore where.does donna.tartt.live blCk.eyed.oeas.lets get.reatrded (I was trying to prove to someone who didn’t believe me that this was the original title of “Let’s Get It Started.” IT IS.)
How does this happen? Why does it happen only when I’m searching Google on my phone and not when I’m sending texts or typing emails or whatever? What the hell is going on?
The problem is that your iPhone has a dozen or more different keyboards it displays for different situations. The default keyboard, which shows up most of the time you’re entering text in an app, looks like this:
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But when you’re typing in that little bar that appears at the bottom of Safari, the default web browser on iPhones, the keyboard is a teensy bit different. It looks like this:
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Look at that tiny period key lurking, just waiting for your right thumb to brush it on your way to the space bar. Infuriating! I ask, emphatically:
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Why.on.earth.would.a.keyboard.be.designed.like.this?!
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It’s likely because it was built for a different age of the internet. In days of yore, when you wanted to search for something on Google (or, I guess, some other search engine), you opened your browser, typed “google.com” into the URL field, went to Google’s homepage, and then typed your search terms into its search bar. But now browsers let you skip that step. When you type a random sentence into the field at the bottom of Safari, it knows that what you actually want it to do is ask a search engine “if someone is poisned what does it go down on the death certificate as.”
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Which is great! It’s a terrific development that your browser understands you and lets you skip a step. However, Apple has not caught up. That little box you type in is still, as far as Apple is concerned, a URL field, and it’s thoughtfully given you the “URL keyboard”—the one with the period right there next to the space bar, so when you want to type “www.askjeeves.com/search” or whatever, it’s easy as pie.
Of course, no one types URLs anymore. Lots of people don’t even know what URLs are! Even when I am going to slate dot com on my phone, I simply type “slate” (sometimes “salte”) and trust that the gods of mobile web navigation will get me there eventually. They always do! But when I’m typing a longer search term in my browser, I’m tripped up by that residual period. And my search becomes … Shatnerian.
It’s not that this stray punctuation stops me from finding whatever it is I’m searching for, usually. It’s just so inelegant, a feeling I so rarely get from my Apple devices. Isn’t that the whole point of Apple devices? They work invisibly, effortlessly, and elegantly? So get on it, Apple. Fix this thing! So that when my wife is arrested, the search terms in her prosecutors’ bail-denial filings (“husband complains like andy rooney sympathetic jury?”) are clean, crisp, and elegant. Period.
Source: Slate
