Text Entry
Text Entry
[Ponytail and Cueball are sitting on a couch, with Megan standing behind them.  Cueball is pointing a remote at a television. The word space is written inside a frame.] Television: O...U...R...SPACE...P...L... Remote: Click Click Click
[Caption below the panel:] The weirdest thing about 2019 is obviously that Donald Trump is president, but I think the second weirdest is that you sometimes still have to type stuff in by picking letters on a screen one at a time with a cursor like you're entering a high score in a 1980s arcade game.

In this comic, Randall remarks upon something that he considers to be an absurdity of modern living; that in spite of our amazing advances in technology, there still exist user interfaces in 2019 where a person has to "pick letters" to type, a somewhat clunky and inefficient method of text entry. This can be seen when doing searches in a TV guide menu or in menus for streaming options like Netflix or Hulu . Some of these menus may allow for voice searches or support bluetooth keyboards , but the traditional method is still to select letters via a cursor.  Many controllers for devices only have a few buttons, which makes it necessary to use schemes such as scrolling around a picture of a keyboard to laboriously select letters, making this extremely inconvenient and annoying to users. The fact that these haven't been replaced with better interfaces comes as a surprise to Randall, hence him  believing it to be the second most weird thing in 2019. Cueball is probably looking up Our Planet which was a popular Netflix series when this comic was released. Cueball has spelled out "O U R [space] P L" so far.
Randall references the " high score " in an arcade game . When achieving a high score in an arcade game, the user typically is able to enter their name or initials into the machine. These are entered by picking letters one by one (and usually under a time limit, for extra fun and/or stress ), as the comic mentions.
The title text mentions the keyboard system Dvorak , a recurrent theme on xkcd, which is a keyboard layout patented by August Dvorak and William Dealey . As the Dvorak layout is optimized for more efficient typing with two hands, it is unlikely that using it would be more efficient than a standard Qwerty when limited to cursor entry methods. Another drawback would be that the Dvorak layout is visually unfamiliar to most people, even to many Dvorak typists who rarely look at their keyboard and instead rely on muscle-memory to find keys. As such it could be confusing for users to use for TV selection menus compared to either the more visually familiar Qwerty layout or showing letters in alphabetical order. Alternately, Randall may be referring to Dvorak’s placement of frequently used letters clustered in the center as a potential slight improvement over the linear A-Z layout of such interfaces (a half-measure offered ironically, of course).
Although the focus of this comic is on the text entry method, Randall prefaces the comic with what he considers to be the actual weirdest thing about 2019: that Donald Trump is the president of the United States of America. Randall had previously expressed support for Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton, in the comic 1756: I'm With Her which preceded the 2016 US Presidential Election. In that comic he did not mention Trump. Although several comics may have a relation to Donald Trump becoming president, this is the first time ever , Donald Trump has been mentioned by his full name in a standard xkcd comic. (In 1939: 2016 Election Map he is referred to by his surname).
[Ponytail and Cueball are sitting on a couch, with Megan standing behind them.  Cueball is pointing a remote at a television. The word space is written inside a frame.] Television: O...U...R...SPACE...P...L... Remote: Click Click Click
[Caption below the panel:] The weirdest thing about 2019 is obviously that Donald Trump is president, but I think the second weirdest is that you sometimes still have to type stuff in by picking letters on a screen one at a time with a cursor like you're entering a high score in a 1980s arcade game.
