It’s part keyboard app, part corraler of links and information. At the bottom of the keyboard, there’s a big black forward-slash; when you tap it, you open up a handful of mini-search engines that you can use without having to leave the keyboard. The Slash team thinks of the app as a mobile-first search engine, and they’re connecting with partners and APIs like Foursquare, Spotify, and Google to surface information as you need it. Type “/spotify the weeknd” to find a song, or “/foursquare diner” to look for places—pick one from the search results that pop up and a link shows up in the text box. There’s no copying and pasting, no complicated share menus. Everything happens within the keyboard itself. It all works within the QWERTY setup, too, in an app that looks almost exactly like the keyboard that comes with your iPhone.
Rather than try to reinvent the wheel like, say, Minuum—which any Dvorak devotee will tell you is a fool’s errand—the Slash team took the existing interface and added to it. “Knowing that people have a pretty low threshold for change in these extremely familiar situations,” says Slash cofounder Nick Barr, “we wanted to start from the keyboard and then figure out how to go from there.”
Way back when, Slash was conceived as a messaging app, a sort of platform for you to get everything done with chat windows. But CEO Cem Kozinoglu worried that many of the services he hoped to integrate—Facebook, Google, Instagram—would see Slash as a competitor and cut off access. “I had to find a way to bypass that,” Kozinoglu says, “and somehow find a Trojan horse which wouldn’t have the issue of getting shut down.” He started poking around, and came across “pretty much the only piece of software that’s between your operating system and your apps.” The keyboard.
Welcome to the command line.
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/130810384747
