Gboard has gone beyond helping you enter text. It can now be used to translate your words into a myriad of other languages on the fly.

This free add-on from Google can be used in any application where an on-screen keyboard is available.

“It’s this long process of demos and decisions and feedback that creates this long, iterative progression … that leads you from not-very-promising ideas to products you can ship.”

Curious what it was like to work at Apple during its Golden Age of design? What exactly did the creative process look like? On this episode of the Apple Chat podcast, I sit down with Ken Kocienda, a programmer who spent 15 years at Apple during the Steve Jobs era. He worked on the first versions of the Safari web browser, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. His new book, Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs, chronicles his experiences working at the company and offers an inside look at the creative process that made the team successful.

On the podcast, Kocienda discusses his role in the development of the iOS keyboard, explaining how text entry evolved and offering insight into the autocorrect algorithm. He walks us through the Darwinian process of creative selection, describing how the demo pyramid functioned to provide feedback and move an idea from prototype to product. Listen in for his experience presenting a demo to Jobs himself and learn how the original spirit of the Macintosh lives on at Apple today!

Since iOS 8, the QuickType predictive text has been a tentpole feature of the iPhone’s keyboard. It analyzes the text you’ve typed so far and remembers new words that you type so it can suggest them later. However, if you tend to misspell a word, it automatically learns that word and offers it in the suggestions. If this happens a lot, it might even attempt to autocorrect the correctly spelled word to the misspelled “learned” word.

The iOS keyboard might also offer suggestions for embarrassing words it has learned. Having such words pop up in the suggestions can be really annoying. Let’s see how to remove certain words from the iOS keyboard dictionary.

The one part of your iPhone or iPad you use the most is the on screen keyboard, a fantastically complex little app in its own right that must meet your needs all the time, across a ton of different situations. Whether you’re typing an iMessage, a Note or Reminder, or an email to your family, you’re using the iOS Keyboard. Why not take the time to get to know it even better?

Here’s a list of five great tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your time with this ubiquitous bit of software at the center of your iOS experience.

This is actually my favorite tip ever, and it’s usually the one I share with any new iOS owners I come across.

When you’re tapping away on the keyboard on your iPhone, there are bound to be times when you miss the right key. It happens, right? So, the options are to tap the delete button, and deal with all the auto-correct stuff, or just do this one little thing and make it all better.

Holding an iPad, especially the larger-sized iPad one through four, can be an exercise in finger strength, especially when typing with your thumbs in landscape mode and holding the iPad with both hands. Luckily, back in iOS 5, Apple gave us all the ability to split the iPad keyboard and move it closer to the middle of the screen. This also comes in handy with the new iPad mini when in landscape mode.

Here’s how to make it happen.

With iOS 5, Apple included Emoji as a standard keyboard option, obviating the need for separate Emoji apps (previously the only way to get the cute characters on your iOS device). The Emoji option continued in iOS 6, adding a bunch of new cute characters, as well as some welcome gay and lesbian avatars as well.

If you haven’t enabled Emoji yet, or you want to disable it for whatever reason, read on.