Productivity focused third party iOS keyboard app ThingThing is hoping to woo fans of the Sunrise calendar by adding a meeting invite feature — following the latter’s kiss-of-death acquisition by Microsoft last year.
Redmond has chosen integrating Sunrise features into its flagship email app Outlook over maintaining two apps, meaning the Sunrise app itself will sunset at the end of this month. The latter’s own keyboard scheduling app Meet has also been closed. Leaving some unhappy Sunrise fans looking for their next calendar app. And ThingThing pulling out the stops to be able to offer them a fully featured alternative. Which it now reckons it can.
ThingThing, a Barcelona-based startup, launched its third party iOS keyboard app over a year ago, with an initial focus on smoothing the pain of app switching by letting users do more within the keyboard itself by integrating with a variety of third party services. The team has since closed a $400,000 seed round.
So with ThingThing you can, for instance, pull in photos from your camera roll, view appointments in your calendar, grab files from Dropbox, Box or Google Drive, see your contacts, view your Todoist tasks, see what’s in your Pocket, and eyeball stuff on your Instagram or Facebook. All without leaving whatever other app you’re using because ThingThing lives within the keyboard panel (it also has its own predictive keyboard).
Now, with its latest app update, ThingThing is touting the launch of ‘Calendar 2.0’, whereby the flagship new feature is the ability to send meeting invites right within the keyboard — including for one-to-one and for group meetings… So basically the Sunrise Meet killer app.
ThingThing CEO and co-founder Olivier Plante has even been taking to Twitter to encourage Sunrise fans to download ThingThing… Which is certainly a quicker route to recovering in-keyboard meeting scheduling vs hoping/waiting for Microsoft to add it to Outlook…
“A lot of users have asked us to create invites directly from the keyboard just like Sunrise Meet, and we did,” says Plante. “The whole back end of creating meetings, making sure it’s easy for users… we did it all, and more neat additions are coming up!”
If you’re using the feature to invite a non-ThingThing user to a meeting they won’t need to download the app to accept — rather it will email them a link to a meeting invite where they can respond. And, if they accept, they’ll get a calendar invite emailed back to them.
While the calendar is the big focus for this update, another new addition lets ThingThing users manage their Todoist to-do list inside the keyboard — so they can now create tasks within the keyboard and save a task from a message by holding and copying any text while the app is active, which will trigger an option to ‘Save inside’. Todoist tasks can also be marked as complete and shared via the app.
“For now, we support Todoist but we’ll shortly rollout other integrations such as Wunderlist, Evernote, OneNote, Trello, Asana, etc,” adds Plante. “Toward a keyboard as a platform!”
