The new Apple TV’s Siri Remote is great, except for all of those times that it isn’t.
We’ve run afoul of the remote’s touchpad a few times; it’s fine for navigating (and less fine for entering passwords), but sometimes it does its job too well. For example, we can’t even count the number of times we’ve been watching a movie and accidentally nudged the pad, sending our show scrubbing all willy-nilly into the past or future.
It’s pretty annoying, but luckily, Apple thought so, too, so it gave us a couple ways to fix that mistake when it happens. The company could have just disabled the touchpad while things were playing, but we’re not engineers.
These two fixes are the next best options.
Option 1: Just whale on the Menu button
We aren’t sure how Apple came up with the name of the Siri Remote’s Menu button because we basically use it for everything but opening menus. It probably should have been called the Back button, since we use it to exit out of everything. And if you accidentally skip ahead or back in the show or movie you’re watching, a quick tap on Menu will set you right again.
Option 2: Turn the touchpad against itself
I prefer this second option because I like the idea that if the touchpad got me into this mess, it has a responsibility to get me out of it again.
The first part of this plan is kind of counterintuitive, but stick with me here: You need to scrub on the pad more. Odds are your nudge just sent you forward or backward a few seconds or minutes, and you need to make the problem worse before it gets better. So scrub the hell out of that thing, and watch what happens.
Once the marker is way the hell away from where you were, you’ll see a little marker on your timeline. It’s just a little line that cuts across the bar. That’s where you were, and it might not have been visible from the slight accidental nudge. So now, all you have to do is scrub back to there, and your cursor will snap to that line. Press play, and you’re done.
First tip via iDownloadBlog
