Google recently launched their Chrome extension for Google Keep, their note-organizing application (similar to Evernote). While die-hard Keep fans rejoiced, the extension still is quite limited in its features compared to the web-based Keep and the Keep smartphone app itself.
What’s Good:
- “Save to Keep” conveniently shows up as an option in your right-click menu
- You can clip the images or text, and the extension will pop-up a preview in the extension
- You can remove the page title and url within the extension. I’m not sure why you’d want that, but at least there’s a convenient “Undo” link for it.
- It has an icon so that you can immediately open the relevant note in Keep
- Label your note on the spot, with drop-down support for your pre-existing labels
- Easy to delete the note within the extension if you change your mind
What needs improvement
- No support for multiple accounts. I’m usually logged into my work and personal Gmail accounts simultaneously, and I’d like to be able to toggle which Keep account to save a note to. Google is usually pretty good about multi-account support, so this is surprising, and hopefully they plan on correcting it soon.
- For some reason, you can’t change the note title within the extension. It grabs the page title by default, and you have to go to Keep in the browser to change the note title.
- You can’t grab text and images at the same time. I tried to highlighting over images and text, and sent it to Keep, but it only took the text.
- One commenter pointed out that clipping text doesn’t retain any formatting. You’ll have to do a lot of editing to make it look right in the browser later.
- Right-clicking on a link doesn’t offer to save the link itself. Instead it asks if you want to save the current page.
- No keyboard shortcuts. True fans of Google Keep would find that useful.
- Ability to set reminders
- Hashtag labeling
- Checkboxes
- Ability to share the note
- Changing the note color
Google Keep’s Chrome extension will probably be welcomed by its fans, but I don’t think Google is marketing the extension very hard. The Chrome Web Store only shows 121 reviews as I write this. Granted, it only launched in the past 48 hours, but it’s still a Google app, so you’d think there’d be more than that by now. If that’s the case, it’s no wonder Google didn’t make the extension more feature-rich, and they were probably aiming for a soft launch. (Update: It’s been a few days, and there’s 32,000 users. They started notifying users within the Keep app itself.)
Hopefully, we won’t have to wait long before Google releases a more advanced version of Keep to the Chrome Web Store.
UPDATE: I just figured out that Google Keep and the chrome extension will let you capture animated gifs too! *rubs hands vigorously* This is gonna be fun.
Featured image sourced from Google Play Store
Have you been using the Google Keep Chrome Extension? What do you think? Let me know in the comments!
