Driven: Minuum Keyboard
Many moons ago I found out about the Minuum Keyboard and wanted to have a go at it. It was still in development so I registered with them and waited for an email. That email just came in yesterday to be a part of their Android Beta testing. Excited, I rushed into the Google Play Store to download it only to find a US$ 3.85 price tag on it. A price. On a Beta! This is the first time I've ever heard of this!
But I'm still ready to part ways with RM 10, mainly because they also have an Indiegogo crowd fund going on at USD 5 a pop at the same time. I figure I'd give them some support. One less flat white at Artisan, no biggie.
How It Works
Minuum is a typing keyboard app that compresses all three layers of your conventional QWERTY into one. So you type and it recognizes your alphabets, and give you a range of possible words. I say a range because in SwiftKey you only get 3 options, and in this app you can keep scrolling sideways and not see an end. Kind of tells how much confidence they have in their auto correct algorithms.
You will need two fingers to make this keyboard work well, unlike the SwiftKey we've grown to love so much. Different swipes and slides will also trigger various commands like the Space, Period, Enter and Erase. Plant 2 fingers onto the board and drag up, and you will get a full-sized keyboard perfect for typing addresses and the range of slangs.
How It's Good
For one thing, it leaves you with much more screen real estate. This feature is perfect for phones with lower screen size and resolution, and also for people with sight problems but refuse to wear glasses. It also executes commands via swipes and strokes, so it reduces a tonne of command buttons.
How It's Bad
It's a good alternative to the stock keyboard that comes with a Google devices, but SwiftKey users will never ever find any reason to move.
Firstly they require two fingers, hence hands, to operate efficiently because users will still actually type one key at a time. Then it depends a lot on auto correct, more so than any other typing app in the market today actually. Not that their auto correct is bad, they are usually very accurate. But they also usually bombard you with so many suggestions you lose more time than just erasing and retyping them again.
It's inefficient for us Malaysians because our language involve too many local slangs and cross-language words. I'm not saying it will always be a problem, Minuum learns as you create weird words and push them higher up on the correction list the more often you use them. But the fact that you most probably have to engage the full keyboard to properly insert those words without it always automatically replacing it with words it thinks you're actually trying to spell out annoys the hell out of me.
Their aggressive move to shave off so much keyboard space failed to include one-click buttons to some of the most common punctuation. The fact that you then have to squint so hard to figure out where the small comma is located, then keep hitting the wrong set of keys because they're so god-damned tiny, begs to question the actual efficiency of this app in the first place. Or that you keep mistaking the apostrophe for a comma.
But the worst thing about the Minuum Keyboard is the fact that I had to pay US$ 3.85 to download the beta version! That's like paying a restaurant to submit your survey forms.
The Verdict
Honestly the only reason why I'm still stuck on this app is because I paid nearly RM 10 for it. I'm really hoping that some time in the future, hopefully really soon, I will start getting used to it and actually like it. If that ever happens I will write another post to explain how wrong I was and what an awesome app this is. But that may be an alternate reality altogether, as far as I can tell now. So if you're skeptical, keep to SwiftKey while you await my (possibly not going to happen) follow up post on this app.
