NOTEWORTHY

Dick Pountain/Idealog 242 /14 September 2014 13:35

One of the inescapable facts of life is that memory worsens as you get older. 40 years ago I could wake in the night with an idea and still remember it next morning. 30 years ago I put a notepad and pencil by my bedside to record ideas. 20 years ago I started trying to use mobile computers to take notes. I last wrote here exactly two years ago about how tablet computing was helping my perpetual quest (I confessed that text files stored on DropBox worked better for me than Evernote and its many rivals). So why revisit the topic just now? Well, because I just dictated this paragraph into my Nexus 7 using Google Keep and that still feels like fun.

I've played with dictation software for years, right from the earliest days of Dragon Dictate, but always found it more trouble than it was worth and practically unusable. So why is Google Keep any different? Mainly because I was already using it as my principal note-taker, as it syncs between my Nexus and my Yoga laptop with great success. I actually prefer Keep's simplistic "pinboard" visual metaphor to complex products like OneNote and Evernote that offer hierarchical folder structures, and its crude colour-coding scheme is remarkably useful. So when one day Google announced that I could now talk into Keep I tried and it just worked, transcribing my mumblings with remarkable accuracy and speed. Voice only works on Android, not on Windows, and it doesn't support any fancy editing commands (but who needs them for note taking)? Does that mean my 30-year quest is over and I've settled on one product? Er, actually no - I now have *three* rival note storage systems working at the same time, can't make a final choice between them and find myself struggling to remember whether I saved that tamale recipe into Keep, OneNote or Pocket. Doh...

The thing is, there are notes and notes. When I get an idea for, say, a future Idealog column, that's only a few dozen words that fit neatly onto a Google Keep "card". I colour these green to spot them more easily, though like everything Google, Keep is search-based so just typing "Ide" brings up all Idealog notes. On the other hand long chunks, or whole articles, clipped from magazines and newspapers stretch Keep's card metaphor beyond its usefulness (and its integration of pictures is rudimentary). For such items OneNote's hierarchical navigation becomes useful to separate different categories of content. Then there are whole web pages I want to save for instant reference, like recipes, maps or confirmation pages from travel sites. In theory I *could* send these straight to OneNote, or even paste them into Keep, but Pocket is way more convenient than either and works equally well from inside Chrome on Nexus, Yoga and phone (Chrome's Send To OneNote app doesn't work properly on my Yoga).

The fundamental problem is perhaps insoluble. Capturing fleeting ideas requires the fastest possible access: no more than one click is tolerable. But to find that idea again later you need structure, and structure means navigation, and navigation means clicks... Mu current combination is far, far better than any I've tried before - popping up a new Keep note or saving a Pocket page at a click is pretty good - but once I accumulate sufficient data the question of where I stored a particular item *will* become critical. This wouldn't be such a big deal if either Android or Windows 8 searches could see inside these applications, but they can't. Neither tablet search nor the otherwise impressive Win8 search will find stuff inside either Keep or OneNote, which isn't that surprising given that both apps store their data in the cloud rather than locally, and in different clouds owned by different firms who hate each other's guts.

On top of that there's the problem of different abilities within the same app on the different platforms. I've said Keep voice only works on Android, not on Windows (voice input also works in Google Search on Android, and tries to on Yoga but says it can't get permission to use the mike). OneNote on Android can record sound files but can't transcribe them, and though it syncs them with its Windows 8 app, the latter can't record and plays files clunkily in Windows Media Player. In short, it's a mess. Perhaps the paid-for, full version of OneNote is slicker, though I'm not greatly tempted to find out. Perhaps Google will soon enhance the abilities of Keep *without* rendering it slow and bloated. Perhaps there is a Big Rock Candy Mountain and somewhere among its lemonade fountains there's a software start-up that gets it about note taking...