Happy Saturday, friends! What better way to celebrate the week’s ceremonial end than by bestowing your phone with a brand new keyboard?
OK. So maybe there are a few better ways than that, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some fun to be had in sending text messages to organise the real celebrating faster than you ever dreamed possible. And, lucky for you, this week was a good for keyboard enthusiasts.
YouTube: Google’s YouTube app just got a functional, stylish makeover this week. Along with an updated, Google Now-esque, card-based design, you’ll also be able to enable your ADD by playing videos while looking for others, and devouring whole playlists. In the new version of YouTube, all you have to do is swipe down on a playing video, and it’ll shrink down to a tiny version in the corner, leaving you free to do whatever other YouTube goodness you have to attend to. And if that includes searching for and/or watching playlists on your mobile app, you’re in luck for the first time ever. The app’s also getting a little tweak to help it play nice with the lovely Chromecast (or Google TV, PS3 or whathaveyou). Free.
Minuum: Minuum gives you all the keys you need in one, single row, but supposedly with all the same power of a full-blown keyboard. It does this thanks to a “specialised auto-correction algorithm that allows highly imprecise typing,” so drunk, tired, uncoordinated or otherwise, you can type as poorly as you want and still get something that (hopefully) approximates real, live words. Plus, you can resize the keyboard and move it anywhere on your screen, so your vision will never be too impaired. The ultimate goal of Minuum is to promote “delightfully fast sloppy typing”, which is certainly something most people can get behind. Plus, you’re getting back almost of the touchscreen space you’d otherwise lose with a normal keyboard, so it’ll be nice to actually be able to see what you’re typing. And unlike some other alternative keyboards, Minuum keeps the same general order of QWERTY, so you won’t have to relearn a totally new system of typing. $4.