Mar 9, 2018 - Explore 25+ Mac apps like Google Keep, all suggested and ranked. Changing branches in visual studio for mac. Evernote is a cross-platform, freemium app designed for note taking,.

Google Keep is usually referred to as being in the same class as Evernote, OneNote, DEVONthink and Apple Notes. However, in practice it's just not in the same league. That's really surprising in a product from Google, which typically goes by the rule that with great power comes terrible design.

Google Maps and Gmail, for instance, are both vastly more powerful than their rivals but are maddeningly fiddly to use. Google Keep isn't fiddly but it has little power, barely enough to make this better than sticking Post-It notes on your screen. If design were just about appearance, then Google Keep beats all comers.

It is bright, colorful and modern-looking where all of its rivals could do with some new paint on the edges. However, design encompasses both how something works and how you use it. The reason for getting one of this type of note app instead of just staying with TextEdit or saving things in your email is generally two-fold.

The most important reason is a need to manage a lot of information, which means storing and quickly retrieving all sorts of data from text you've typed to PDFs you've dragged in. The next most important is the ability to very quickly add new information. If you already have Google Keep open on your Mac's browser than you can swiftly drag certain items to it.

You can also immediately start typing notes into a blank section at the top of the page. If you already have Google Keep open on your iOS device then you can tap Take a Note and begin writing.

It's just when you don't happen to have the site or the app open that it's a chore. Evernote optionally gives you a menubar app on Mac that you can call up with a keystroke and start typing into. DEVONthink has a similar feature called up by a keystroke or by opening the Sorter on the side of your Mac screen. Google Keep has nothing like this. You really need to be in it all the time to make it worth using.

The service and app Google Keep can store text and images in GIF, JPEG, PNG and Google's own WEBP format. They must be less than 10MB and 25 megapixels. You'll note that we didn't mention PDFs —more on that in a bit. You can add voice notes on iOS, even though Google's own support pages say this feature is exclusive to Android devices. If you do add voice notes then, very nicely, what you say is transcribed automatically.

No other note service we tried has this feature. If you're using the iOS app or the Chrome browser then you can save web pages but what it really saves is a bookmark to them.

So you can't archive a page as it appears today, you can only store a link to it. Consequently, Google Keep is for notes you type yourself, images within certain quite reasonable limits, and bookmarks to web pages. Even with the limitations, you can still end up with a lot of notes over time - and that's another area where Google Keep is very weak. As it's a Google product, there is an extensive and powerful search feature to help you find a note you've written. However, you cannot, say, group all your notes about a planned vacation into one notebook as you would in Evernote, one section as you would in OneNote or one database as you might in DEVONthink.