Touchscreen keyboards still present something of a challenge to both users and developers. Its hard to type accurately with them and they take up valuable real estate on devices smaller screens.

SwiftKey is aiming to solve the latter problem with version 4.3 of its Android keyboard app. The Layouts for Living feature enables users to choose from three customisable positions. 

The most interesting is Thumb, which splits the keyboard in two to enable typing with each thumb – especially useful on wider devices. Theres also a Compact layout, which reduces the keyboards width for use on devices with larger screens, and the normal Full mode. Each of these can be undocked and moved around the screen by the user to make sure theyre not getting in the way of anything important.

The 4.3 update also includes a Canadian English language model, which picks places and names based on contextual knowledge – SwiftKey gives the example of opting for Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper over Stephen King, or Calgary over California.