Getting onboard with Gboard

Third party iOS keyboards seem to be all the rage these days, and yesterday, Google introduced their offering in this field, Gboard.

How good is it? Well, I've deleted both SwiftKey and Microsoft's Wordflow from my iPhone.

It's terrific. It has the same "feel" as Swiftkey with the same swipe accuracy as Wordflow, and it lets you perform Google, emoticon, GIF and pretty much any other search you want straight from the keyboard without app switching. The content you search for can then be embedded into whatever it is you're typing into.

So while Twitter let me search for animated GIFs in Twitter, with Gboard, I can now search for GIFs in, say, iMessenger, and then copy and paste the GIF right into an iMessage, all from within the keyboard.

I recently reviewed Wordflow and quite liked it, but there were some issues relating to the spacing and placement of things that made me slow down my typing considerably.

Gboard doesn't have those issues.

The only downside is that, like Wordflow, it's mysteriously and frustratingly not available in the Canadian app store. But a quick switch to my US iTunes account dealt with that.