Microsoft, on Thursday, released its Garage-made Hub keyboard app for Apple’s iOS. The keyboard was first launched for Android just a little over a month ago and brings in many exciting and useful features to the standard keyboard layout.
The Hub keyboard was developed by Steve Won, a senior designer on the Office team who wanted to make it easier to be able to access data without transitioning multiple times between apps. His frustrations took him to Microsoft Garage where he assembled a team via the internal //oneweek Hackathon in 2015. The seven coders helped him build a keyboard app that allows users to quickly access data from other apps, allows multi-thread clipboard support, instant translation and much more.
The keyboard saw a lot of positive feedback on Android and now Microsoft is finally rolling it out for iOS.
The feature set on both these platforms aren’t exactly same, though. This sees to be because of the permission restrictions on iOS. You get a single thread clipboard, it lets you copy and share the URLs for Office 365 documents saved in OneDrive and SharePoint and also lets you share contact information present in Office 365 or stored on your phone. Another feature missing at launch is the translation service, which could appear in a future update.
Personally I don’t like switching between apps to do different things on my smartphone,
Steve Won, a senior designer on the Office team who came up with the idea for Hub Keyboard, had said.
But all these different apps on a smartphone, they have to conform to rules of a keyboard and that got me thinking about the project as an interesting idea I wanted to explore more. We’re giving users a wider gamut of tools.
To access any of these features, you will be required to login using your Office 365 account information. You’ll find the settings for the app there.
