After a successful Indigogo funding campaign and a closed trial period, design startup Whirlscape is finally making its Minuum Keyboard available to the public — giving you all the screen space you need by condensing your full, QWERTY keyboard into one, itty bitty line.
What does it do?
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.
Why do we like it?
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 will be nice to actually be able to see what you’re typing. 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.
Even though the keyboard is still in beta, it’s being sold for $4 a pop, which almost certainly has to do with the high amount of interest the app has had in its early campaign. But for something with such a high retention rate — around 8000 users have remained active out of the initial 9500 that signed up — it might just be worth it.
Minuum
Download this app for: Android ($4)
The best part: saves space
The worst part: no autocorrect is perfect