Google Keep for iPhone and Mac disappoints, imposes profound limitations on users
Even with Google's powerful search, the company's Keep service is too lightweight for serious use, but AppleInsider squeezes the most out of it that we can.
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.
Most significantly of all, you can't add any PDFs to Google Keep. So if you're collecting any research, gathering any information, you have to have a second app: Google Keep cannot be your sole one.
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.
You can tag and then you can search on those tags. Plus Google recently introduced an automated tagging feature: Google scans through all your text and categorizes notes based on what it finds. That's nice, and it works, but you don't know what the categories are and you can't impose any other organization on your notes.
We said that Google Keep is like sticking Post-It notes on your monitor. It is. Just as your monitor can only hold so many, treat Google Keep the same. If you just need to jot down something for today, Google Keep is fine.
If you are doing any kind of protracted work gathering information, writing lots of notes or trying to organize your thoughts, Google Keep is worthless on its own.
It's possible that this will change: the service has continued to develop throughout the four years since its launch. However, Google Keep replaced Google Notebook which did let you organise your notes and was shuttered after six years.
The most recent development to Google Keep sees it being added to the company's G Suite of apps that already includes the word processor Google Docs. Now from within Google Docs you can save text to Google Keep.
That seems to be just a way of guaranteeing that you end up with more notes than Google Keep can usefully manage for you.
It also works the other way, too, letting you save notes to Google Docs. However, that seems like turning Google Docs into an app for keeping the notes you can no longer find in Google Keep.
For whatever reason, Google Keep continues to be regarded as a competitor to the likes of Evernote and the rest but that doesn't seem to be what Google wants and it isn't what Google delivers.
Google Keep is a free online service and there is an iOS app which requires iOS 8.0 or higher and is on the App Store.
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.
Most significantly of all, you can't add any PDFs to Google Keep. So if you're collecting any research, gathering any information, you have to have a second app: Google Keep cannot be your sole one.
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.
You can tag and then you can search on those tags. Plus Google recently introduced an automated tagging feature: Google scans through all your text and categorizes notes based on what it finds. That's nice, and it works, but you don't know what the categories are and you can't impose any other organization on your notes.
We said that Google Keep is like sticking Post-It notes on your monitor. It is. Just as your monitor can only hold so many, treat Google Keep the same. If you just need to jot down something for today, Google Keep is fine.
If you are doing any kind of protracted work gathering information, writing lots of notes or trying to organize your thoughts, Google Keep is worthless on its own.
It's possible that this will change: the service has continued to develop throughout the four years since its launch. However, Google Keep replaced Google Notebook which did let you organise your notes and was shuttered after six years.
The most recent development to Google Keep sees it being added to the company's G Suite of apps that already includes the word processor Google Docs. Now from within Google Docs you can save text to Google Keep.
That seems to be just a way of guaranteeing that you end up with more notes than Google Keep can usefully manage for you.
It also works the other way, too, letting you save notes to Google Docs. However, that seems like turning Google Docs into an app for keeping the notes you can no longer find in Google Keep.
For whatever reason, Google Keep continues to be regarded as a competitor to the likes of Evernote and the rest but that doesn't seem to be what Google wants and it isn't what Google delivers.
Google Keep is a free online service and there is an iOS app which requires iOS 8.0 or higher and is on the App Store.
Comments
Thanks. I thought I was the only one in the world that found Google Maps mind-numbingly bad design, cumbersome and just a RPITA. From it's horrible zoom tracking on fingers to slow frame-rate updates it is just cumbersome. It has some really good data but the UI... Just horrid.
It's like having a heavily modified Corvette with 1200 horsepower but the car is stuck in the garage most of the time because the fuel pump doesn't work properly and there's no one to fix it. Getting it out means a rough ride and the engine cutting out all the time.
The 90 horsepower dog ugly Yaris (the car looks worse than the old AMC Gremlin) would actually do a better job from getting from point A to B.
Apple maps works well for me. And if I am at the desktop, I will use Bing instead.
I will only use YouTube from Google on occasion for a how to video. The rest of their product offerings offer very little from what else is available.
By the way the Android version is easier to use than the iOS version (thanks to the standard back button), but in terms of functionality there is no difference.
The main advantage of Google Keep is not mentioned in the article. It runs everywhere on all my devices without limitation (Evernote is free on maximum 2 devices, Apple Notes is not available on Android, ...)
Like with the rest of the articles in this "series," we address operational costs.
Guys, please save yourself the trouble, and read Mike Elgan's beautiful exposition on Google Keep, why you should use it, and how to use it effectively.
Not that I was expecting any better from AppleInsider.
The purpose of a note taking application is to take notes. It is not a storage container for your documents. That's what Google Drive is for. The majority of people who use note taking applications use it to, well, take notes, not store PDF files.
If you want to reference a PDF document from Google Drive in Google Keep, just place a shareable link for the PDF document in Google Keep and Keep will automatically create an info card for the file inside the Keep note. You know, exactly what it should do. Google Keep uses URIs and URLs as a standard means of reference.
Using a note taking application as a storage container is a fringe use-case that should not be the metric for evaluating the utility or capability of the app. This article does exactly that because the author clearly has an agenda, or is hopelessly misinformed.
After all, in this fantasy, Gmail and Google Maps are "terribly designed".
Tell me how anyone is supposed to take this publication seriously with claims this absurd and baseless?
These are the best cloud services in their respective categories. They are the most used cloud services in their respective categories. They are considered the gold standard measure by which all other services, in their respective categories, are judged.
So, how do "terribly designed" products earn such accolades and universal acclaim?
I'm guessing in these parts, Apple Maps and Apple Mail are the "best executed" products in comparison.
Google has a robust storage service for documents in Google Drive. Google Keep is designed to integrate seamlessly with other Google services, like Google Drive, Google's own robust document container. You can reference any document, not just PDF files, from Google Drive in Google Keep.
The benefits of referencing documents from Google Drive is that there are no size limitations. You can reference a 1TB document from Drive in Keep for all Google cares.
I'm guessing the designers at Google figured a note taking application's focus should be capturing ideas, not storing and managing documents. Especially since they have a more than capable service for storing and managing documents with no restrictive limitations.
I suppose there's an argument to be made that Google could provide a seamless function in Keep that automatically uploads documents to Drive and then transparently references them in Keep. That would be constructive criticism.
But when it comes to Google and AppleInsider nothing is constructive much less objective. In light of how "terribly designed" Gmail and Google Maps are, is it any surprise that this publication finds Google Keep "disappointing and profoundly limited"? But excuse me, for entertaining "conspiracy theories".
What use are pretty visual assets and 60FPS animations if in an emergency, a mapping service navigates me to the middle of the ocean?
What use are elegant typography and beautiful iconography if the result of a query from a mapping services is a location 2000 miles away, as opposed to the contextually relevant one 3 blocks away?
And therein lies the problem with Apple and its hardcore proponents. They often conflate good design with pretty visuals, at the expense of thoroughly researched and well-executed use-cases.
"Form over function" has always been Apple's design ethos. And the pitfalls of this philosophy is evident in many of their products, like Apple Maps.
If we can move past the misconception that good design is characterized by well-sculpted user interface widgets and pretty visual assets, as opposed to well-researched use-cases, then the idea that Google services are "terribly designed" becomes laughable.
Take for example Mail on iOS. I remember a time when it refused to allow me to attach files to it. Is this great design? Don't get me wrong, Mail has always looked pretty. But pretty is not good design. And if a service is an impediment to my productivity then it is clearly "terribly designed" no matter how pretty is looks.
Good design empowers. It doesn't limit. It doesn't restrict. It doesn't mislead. It doesn't elucidate a feeling of anxiousness or helplessness. And it's certainly not about pretty pixels.
I won't bore you with my war stories about Apple Maps. But I do know how I feel when I use it compared to Google Maps. And that feeling is what separates great design from great visuals.
When I use Google Maps, I feel empowered. I feel assured. I feel confident. When I use Apple Maps I feel the complete opposite.
A couple of hours ago, I told Google Maps to navigate me to a point of interest. It gladly obliged. But what it did next, is why I insist that your characterization of Google's products and services, as "terribly designed", is tainted by your emotional attachment to Apple, and not ration.
It told me the store I intended to visit was closed. If that is not a great and thoughtful design, I don't know what is. This is an experience that Apple Maps doesn't deliver today. Apple Maps sure does look pretty, but again that is not the definition of a well-designed product by any stretch of the imagination.
Google Keep is not the most featureful note-taking application out there. Google designed Keep to balance simplicity and smarts. If you approach it the way you do a traditional note-taking application like Evernote, well, you're going to be "profoundly disappointed".
But if you learn to exploit its simplicity, it's great search capabilities, its unparalleled AI and Machine Learning chops, its collaboration features, and its many other smarts, you're going to be pleasantly surprised. An open mind is needed for this exploration. If you're already predisposed to believing Google products and services are "terribly designed" don't bother.
Also Google Keep, naturally, is designed to work well with Google services like Chrome, Calendar, Gmail, Photos, Drive, Docs, Google Now, Google Assistant and Google Home. For example, your use-case of referencing a PDF file works best if the file is available in Google Drive. It's a minor inconvenience, but I insist storing and managing documents is neither a fundamental nor popular use-case of a note-taking service.
I'm also not ignoring the possibility that Google Keep just doesn't meet your needs. And that Evernote or Apple Note is appropriate for your workflow. But this article, especially the underhanded slights against Google in it, gives me the feeling that Google Keep was doomed from the start, and that this experiment was not an exercise in objectivity.
And this is my qualm with AppleInsider. I own and use Apple products, but I'm sick of the herd mentality that permeates the community and that automatically ascribes to the tenets that anything Apple does is "great design" and everything Google does is "evil and terrible". This is a common thread with any Google-related thread on this publication.
Anyway, this article, by Mike Elgan, is required reading for anyone really interested in exploring the many hidden and smart features of Google Keep.
https://goo.gl/IDZxfn
None of google's services are free, you just pay for them with your privacy. That's WAY too expensive for me.
"When I use Google Maps, I feel empowered. I feel assured. I feel confident. "
When I use google maps (very rarely), I feel dirty. Like I need to shower, after being forced to walk through a sewer to find the info I wanted.
What a sad world we have become, inculcated with the notions that it's okay to hand over every detail of one's life to data mining and data analysis companies.