Google Keep

Google Keep is a free cloud-based notetaking app which is excellent for capturing ideas, setting yourself reminders, and making checklists. It’s similar to Evernote, in the sense that any notes you capture on your phone are immediately available to you on a PC or Mac when you log in with a Google account.

However, Google Keep has deliberately simplified its interface in a way that makes it extremely intuitive. Notes captured on your phone are displayed as coloured tiles on your computer. You can drag these around the screen as if it were a virtual pinboard, and search your notes by colour. What Google Keep lacks in complexity, it more than makes up for in accessibility and effectiveness.

• Capture notes by using your phone’s keypad, or simply record a voice note – everything you say is automatically converted to text alongside the audio you recorded.
• You can also make notes featuring checklists, drawings, and photographs, and even add reminders that show up directly to your Google Calendar.
• You can install a free plugin for Google Chrome that allows you to quickly save links to interesting websites.
• You can even collaborate on notes, share your ideas quickly and easily with other users, and export your notes into Google Docs if you want access to more formatting options.

Why I Love Google Keep

Photos that you take using Google Keep can have OCR (Optical Character Recognition) performed on them. This means that any text that appears in a photo will be text that you can copy and paste when you open the picture in Google Keep.

Found a quote in a book you are reading that you want to paste into your essay? Simply take a photo of it, and Google Keep will do the rest.