For quite sometime now, the Paranoid Android team has been posting teaser images of Hover — something that would replace Halo in their KitKat builds. Today, they have finally released the first beta of their ROM with Hover baked in, giving ROM maniacs their first look at what it is and how it works.

Hover is an enhanced version of the stock notification system in Android. Once it has been enabled, all new notifications show up at the top of the screen in a transparent window, which only stays for 3 seconds. This notification can be expanded, dismissed or, if the user taps on it, it opens the app in a floating window mode.

Below is a quick video showing Hover in action:

Right now, the only way to dismiss a Hover notification is to tap anywhere else on the screen but the team plans on adding swipe to dismiss and a blacklist feature later on. The latest beta build also contains some other bug fixes and enhancements. The full changelog of the update can be found here while the latest beta build for the Nexus devices can be downloaded here.

Since this is the first release of Hover, there are bound to be some issues and bugs with it. Make sure to let the PA team know about them so that they can squash them.