In pursuit of convenience, the lines between apps are growing more blurred by the day. Your browser comes with a search engine built in now, so you can type searches or addresses and arrive somewhere. Depending on what kind of smartphone you have, you may find it anticipating your needs by showing you the weather forecast for you when the notifications bar is opened, or – if you’re using Google Maps – it may offer to show you the menu for whatever restaurant you traveled to, once you arrive. It makes sense. Ever since pagers were able to tell time, phones have gradually assumed more and more of the role of ‘personal assistant’ to their owners. The people in charge of the OS of your devices are trying their best to make things more convenient, even to the point of weirding you out, because your experience as the user is so crucial to keeping you as a repeat customer.
That said, there are points where convenience makes it very easy to accidentally break things or hand out info you didn’t mean to, like the combination web-search and file-search taskbar.
This seemingly benign blending of the web and your computer’s files creates friction when searching for vague memories of files, or files that might be older, etc. etc. because your computer – rather than offering ‘almost matching’ results like it might if it couldn’t reach for the web – is instead also providing a web search with answers closer to what you typed rather than what you wanted. It happened to me! I went to open an application I downloaded recently and instead of showing me that app (again, downloaded recently) it opened a search in Bing using Microsoft Edge, neither of which are my defaults, and it did this as I hit Enter assuming I wanted a search. Instead of my app. That I was searching for in the taskbar because I didn’t have a desktop shortcut.
The blurring goes beyond simply smoothing transitions between apps into outright obfuscating the function. If you want to open an app, you now need to pick the correct line where your app is labelled as an ‘app’ lest you click the search function instead, which won’t open the app you were looking for. Your files? Oh yeah! When you search for tax stuff, you’re also searching for tax services near you, right?
Even more unfortunate is that this is difficult to turn off – it involves going into the directories of your computer to alter settings, something the average person is understandably wary of, because touching, turning off, or moving the wrong thing can brick the computer. Tutorials are available, but at the same time, if things like the touchscreen or speakers can be switched on and off in the control panel, why should the Start search combining with Web search be buried deeper than that?
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