Just like launcher apps, most people have their favourite keyboard app on Android. Some just use the OEM one, others swear by Google Keyboard, and they’re allowed to be wrong, because as I’m sure you’ll all agree that SwiftKey is the best, right? If you don’t think so then perhaps today’s update will convince you, along with a visual update to their “Hub” (app settings and control) SwiftKey now has an advanced Clipboard, text entry shortcuts and an incognito mode.
Clipboard
This is exactly what is sounds like, whenever you copy text it will be placed into a temporary clipboard that can be quickly accessed by swapping over to the updated hub that now has a clipboard pane. Any text you copy will be kept for 1 hour after which time it will be deleted. If you want to keep something in your clipboard longer you can simply pin it and it will remain there until deleted.
Shortcuts
A Clipboard is good, but what’s better? Shortcuts! For items in your Clipboard, be they pinned or temporary, you can assign a shortcut that SwiftKey will then automatical replace with your chosen text. For instance, you could save your home address and then set the shortcut to home11. Every time you type home11 SwitfKey will replace that with our actual address.
I’ve already added all my email addresses, phone numbers and addresses. If you’re hard of spelling then perhaps you could also add in a few of your most used but misspelt words and then you’ll never need to learn the correct spellen.
Incognito mode
This is exactly what it sounds like when activated your entered text will not be saved and used for future predictions. The example given is very charitable that perhaps you don’t want your significant other to see big diamond as a predicted entry giving away that engagement ring shopping you’ve been doing. I suspect that it will be more used to hide a different sort of Hub from one’s keyboard.
Incognito mode is also activated from the new hub, so just swipe right or click the hamburger menu. From there you’ll get an incognito theme until you return to normal typing. This may save some people from having to long press on recommendations to remove them, temporarily , from their predictions.
With SwiftKey being a free app (which was acquired by Microsoft a while back) I highly recommend you check it out if you either haven’t used it in a while or ever.
Let us know what features you want to see on Android keyboards next?
I love Swiftkey, but it is annoying that you can’t use it for words in Māori that have macron vowels (you can use ō, but not ā, ē, ī and ū). I have reported this issue to them, but they don’t seem able or want to fix it.