And then remember how that notion, very soon after, was mocked? How absurd. How sexist. And on the scale of amazing things a PC could do, how pedestrian and unambitious.
Well, don’t look now. But Google, the company that tamed the Web, built self-driving cars and put a computer on eyeglasses, has just introduced a note pad.
It’s called Google Keep. It’s free. It’s a Web site and an app for Android phones; the two are automatically synchronized. (Astoundingly, until now, Google didn’t supply a note pad app on Android phones.)
Make a note on the phone, it shows up on the site (and any other Android gadgets you own), assuming you’re signed in with the same Google ID on each one.
This isn’t a fresh idea. In many ways, Google Keep is a fairly shameless imitation of Evernote, the beloved free app for Mac, Windows, Android, iPhone/iPad, BlackBerry and Windows Phone. It, too, keeps your notes automatically duplicated across all your gadgets and computers.
That’s not to take away from the power of the idea. Life is full of facts, thoughts and images we’d like to remember. Someone’s phone number. A movie or book someone’s recommending. Things to do. Brainstorms. Where you parked. Family birthdays, driving directions to the doctor, frequent-flier numbers. You always have a computer with you (your phone); why isn’t it the logical place to store these brain bursts?
Especially if it’s incredibly easy and fast to do. If there were much “friction” involved in opening your notepad and recording some notion, you wouldn’t bother. But Google has put a lot of effort into making things effortless. Keep is not just an app; on Android, it’s also a widget — a small scrolling window floating right there on the Home screen. (Evernote does that, too.)
On recent versions of Android (4.2 and later), Keep even appears on the Lock screen. You can consult it without even turning on the phone.
To record a new item, you can type something; speak and record the audio; say something the phone converts into typing (it saves the audio recording, too); or take a picture. Speech and photos are faster than typing; once again, fewer steps means you’re more likely to use the thing. (You have to take the photo; you can’t import one that already exists.)
A text note can be either straight-ahead unformatted text or a checklist complete with little checkboxes or a photo.
In Keep, the notes appear as scrolling tiles, like posts on a Facebook page or, in two-column view, like the tiles on the Windows Phone Start screen. Newest ones appear at the top.
The most important thing to grasp about Keep is how simple it is. Fast and simple and limited, especially compared with Evernote.
That, of course, is its best and worst feature, depending on what kind of personality you have. You won’t have trouble fumbling to find a feature; there aren’t any to find.
You can change a note’s color, but you can’t group them by color. In fact, you can’t group them in any way. There isn’t any notion of folders, or sorting, or filtering. The only thing you can do with a note is drag it up or down, delete it or, by swiping horizontally on the phone’s screen, archive it (that is, remove it from the list but keep it in storage).
In Evernote, by contrast, you can create separate “notebooks” full of notes; you can even put several notebooks into a folder.
An Evernote item can contain more than one data type — a text note might contain a checklist and a photo, for example. Notes can have formatting (bold, italic and so on), and can have Web addresses or geographical locations associated with them. You can tag a note with searchable keywords (“kids,” “sites,” “work,” whatever) for quick retrieval later; in Google Keep, all you can do is search for the text in your notes.
E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/technology/personaltech/google-keep-a-note-pad-lets-you-hold-all-thoughts.html?partner=rss&emc=rss