Thingthing – A Mobile Keyboard App to Quickly Share Files

While sharing a photo from inside a messaging app in iOS is straightforward since most apps already support photo sharing, sharing other things like documents or your calendar schedule within another application is a bit more complicated. You have to open the application that has your document and do the sharing from there. Unpractical is the word to describe the process.

Fortunately, there’s ThingThing keyboard. This app lets you share almost anything from any app that uses a virtual keyboard. It can pick files from your cloud files, animated GIF images, or even your photos from Facebook or Instagram, and add it to your email or WhatsApp message. And as a keyboard, it also has few tricks up its sleeve.

Note: Thingthing is available for both iOS and Android.

Installing the Keyboard

By allowing third-party keyboard apps to run on iOS, Apple opens potential security risks for its users. As a precaution, there are steps that we need to do to install keyboard apps.

After downloading and installing the ThingThing keyboard on your iPhone or iPad, you need to activate it first. Go to “Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> Keyboards -> Add New Keyboard… ” and choose ThingThing from the list. Then go tap ThingThing from the keyboard list and turn on “Allow Full Access.”

Setting Up the Connections

The first thing that you have to do before actually using ThingThing is to set up the connections. It means that you should give ThingThing access to applications or services that you want to use within the keyboard.

To do that open the app and tap the “Connect” button next to the app or service that you are connecting to. The connecting process will be different from one app to another, but basically you will be asked to give access to the application or to log in to the service.

And while you’re at it, tap the hamburger menu at the top left of the screen to open the sidebar menu, and access the “Settings.” Here you can turn on or off many keyboard options such as “Auto Correction” and “Auto-Capitalization.” You can also choose which calendar groups that you will use with the app.

If the service that you need is not available yet, you can send a request to the developer to add it to a future version of ThingThing. All you need to do is to scroll down to the bottom of the screen and tap the “Request Yours” button.

The “Request Services” window will open, and you can tap the “Request” button next to the service that you want. If your preferred service is still not on the list, scroll to the bottom of the screen and tap “Contact us” to send a direct request to the developer.

After tapping the Request button, you will get a confirmation pop-up with an option to get notified when the service that you requested becomes available in the future. The “Requested” button will tell you which ones on the list you’ve requested so you won’t send multiple requests.

Using ThingThing

Using ThingThing is as simple as opening any app that involves a keyboard. You can use it to attach files into emails, insert Facebook photos into Notes, or share your schedules via IMs like WhatsApp or Telegram. The possibilities are unlimited.

After you open one of the apps that can use a keyboard, switch to ThingThing by tapping the globe icon. You can use ThingThing as an ordinary keyboard with support for the English language. Other than the standard auto correct, auto caps, and spelling and suggestions features, you can also slide your finger left and right in the spacebar to move quickly between letters.

But the real super power of ThingThing is in the menubar above the keyboard. Here’s where you can access apps and services that you’ve connected to ThingThing. You can access the apps by tapping the icons. Other than the connected apps or services, you can also open and insert emojis and GIF images.

What’s Next?

ThingThing gives us a glimpse at where the future of apps will go: interoperability among apps. This trend can also be seen in several new generations of apps like Slack, Trello, or IFTTT.

As a keyboard app there’s only one thing that I want ThingThing to be able to do: support languages other than English. Then it’ll become the perfect keyboard app for me.

Have you tried ThingThing? Or do you know other similar apps? Share your opinions in the comment below.