This article was 1st published on our sister Site, Digital World Native.
Have you ever needed to jot down a note, an important fact, a book you want to read, a song that strikes your fancy, or just something that you just know you’d need to remember later? Often, the problem is that you don’t have pen & paper at hand or even if you do, you’ll most likely misplace the note & never find it again.
One of the items that most of us is bound to carry around is the ubiquitous smartphone, & if you don’t have one at hand you’ll often be near a Tablet or a computer, especially while at home or at work. Google Keep is one of the highest rated note taking apps & can be used with just about any device you can imagine. There are native apps available for both the Android & Apple iOS platforms, an applet for Chrome OS & the Chrome browser, & it even exists as a Web app. All data input into any of these devices is kept on Google’s Cloud & is synced in real time across all of them, including the ability to share notes with other users or among the members of a team, & you can even work off line & sync your activity when you reconnect to the Internet.
Some of the more interesting features are the ability to color code notes, insertion of photos from your phone’s camera or of most kinds of image files, creation of lists, including the creation of checklists from text notes, geo-fencing, search by color, time or location-based reminders within notes, OCR text extraction from image files (i.e. from a photograph taken with your phone’s camera & only in English), & transcription of voice recordings. You also have reminders & snooze notifications available on the Android platform.
To organize & categorize your notes you can use labels which can be assigned colors, & if you gather lots of notes, which will no doubt be the case if you start using this app, you can then search by label or by color. The user interface varies slightly among OSs & platforms, but is pretty similar amongst them. You can move notes around & reorder them by dragging them around, visualize them in the standard single column note view or in multicolumn, swipe to remove or archive, etc. It’s really pretty straightforward & intuitive to use, & doesn’t have much of a learning curve at all.
A great example of Google’s commitment to the improvement of Keep’s feature set is one of the most recent features to be added, to which we alluded to earlier. That is, its ability to take a photo & have it quickly made available in digital format, for example by taking a picture of a business card you instantly have the contact details available in text format, without having to type anything.
Keep is a part of Google’s suite of cross-platform productivity apps. It was developed internally at Google & released in 2013 & has been installed in over 50 million Android devices as of September 2015.
You can get it in the Android Play store here, in the Apple App store here, & in the Chrome Web store here.
Image Credit: Google
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