Meet is a keyboard. Sort of. Technically, Meet is a keyboard extension that’s part of the most recent update to Sunrise, a handy calendar app for Android and iOS that pulls in data from your various calendars and social media accounts and presents them as an intuitive, unified vision of your time schedule.
The gist is this: The Meet keyboard extension replaces the typical alphanumeric keys at the bottom of your touchscreen with an interactive calendar. Its main goal is to remove the hassle of scheduling meetings through an email or a text. Using Meet, instead of toggling back to your calendar, you can schedule meetings directly from whatever app you’re using (text messaging, Outlook, Gmail, etc.) by tapping an empty block of time and sending your availability through a link to the person with whom you’re doing the scheduling dance. All that person has to do is tap on the best available time and the meeting will automatically be added to both of your calendars.
Nifty.
So yes, Meet is a keyboard. But it’s also a brilliant bit of UX design masquerading as a productivity tool. Because really, the coolest part about Meet isn’t its functionality; it’s the fact that it’s turning a third-party keyboard into a fully-interactive second screen on your phone. An Apple-sanctioned hack to give your phone split-screen functionality?
Very nifty.
The guys behind Sunrise began thinking about how they could take Apple’s third-party keyboard functionality (rolled out last fall in iOS 8) byond GIFs and emoji. When the team presented Meet to Apple, the idea took the tech giant by surprise. After all, Apple itself hasn’t released a way to use multiple apps simultaneously on the iPhone. “To be honest, Apple didn’t think we could technically do it,” says Jeremy Le Van, one of Sunrise’s co-founders.
Unlike sticker and GIF keyboards, Meet grabs real-time data from an outside app and displays it where alphanumeric keys should be. The clutch is its interactivity; you’re able to fully control an entirely different app while still typing an email or text message.
“The cost of switching between apps is quite painful,” he says. “You lose a lot of context.” The time lost while closing one app and opening another might seem negligible, but for many people being able to split their screen between two apps would be a path to more efficient multitasking.
Of course, split-screen functionality is harder to achieve on the phone. Real estate is at a premium. Microsoft’s Surface Pro allows you to view and interact with multiple apps simultaneously by grabbing and swiping them into place. This is great solution on a tablet, but that interaction doesn’t translate to a much smaller phone screen. That’s part of the reason Sunrise’s workaround is so cool---it repurposes a feature already built into our phones, and one we intuitively understand how to use.
Other apps like ThingThing use a third-party keyboard to let you access your calendar, search, and online tools like Dropbox while still in your messaging apps; people have been jailbreaking their phones to achieve similar results for a while now. Sunrise takes a more focused tact, and it’s done to great effect. In the future, Le Van says, they’d like to build in the functionality to schedule group meetings with Meet, the dynamic of which, you can imagine, is much more complicated. But for now, Meet will do one thing---schedule meetings with one other person---and do it very cleverly and very well.
