Microsoft announced on Wednesday that its Garage has come up with yet another breakthrough. The tech giant released the Hub Keyboard for Android, the world’s first multitasking keyboard.
As of recent times, the Garage seems to be running like a locomotive. We’ve seen amazing innovations coming from this non-mainstream section of Microsoft over the past few weeks. Adding to this list, the company has now released something which can be very useful to almost everyone.
The Hub keyboard is a new keyboard replacement for Android smartphones and tablets that brings many on-demand features to the stock input experience. The keyboard offers features like quick access to data from other apps, multi-thread clipboard, instant translation and much more.
“Personally I don’t like switching between apps to do different things on my smartphone,”
says Steve Won, a senior designer on the Office team who came up with the idea for Hub Keyboard about a year ago.
“But all these different apps on a smartphone, they have to conform to rules of a keyboard and that got me thinking about the project as an interesting idea I wanted to explore more. We’re giving users a wider gamut of tools.”
The new keyboard allows you to paste data items that you recently copied, add in links to your cloud stored documents, link contact details and translate parts of conversations.
“I may be in a text message conversation, then have to jump to contacts for a phone number,”
Won says.
“Rather than forcing users to switch between apps, we bring those apps to them.”
Won says that this keyboard was a personal project that he started last year in March in order to productivity. The developer was able to pluck up a team of seven at Microsoft’s internal //oneweek Hackathon in 2015.
To download Hub Keyboard from the Google Play Store, start here.
