Tag: notetaking

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Computers

5 Great Note-Taking Apps: Google Keep, Apple Notes, Notion, Bear, Microsoft OneNote

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Notes are nested inside custom category tabs; think color-coded tags in a three-ring binder. You can attach specific notes to meetings via Outlook and prioritize them using urgency tags of various levels. If you’re looking for a “professional” notes app, OneNote is a great option.

Plus, if you have a subscription to Microsoft 365 on the desktop, you can then take advantage of Microsoft’s Copilot AI integration in OneNote. The AI helper can create summaries and to-do lists, collate information from various sources, or just rewrite your notes to make them more clear and coherent.

Apple Notes

phone with apple notes on the screen

Photograph: Apple

If you use an iPhone, then Apple Notes is an obvious choice. It comes installed on your phone, and, like Google Keep, it excels in its simplicity. While there are more advanced features, like the ability to add attachments and to clip text and images from the web, they don’t clutter things up.

Organization is also superb if you take the time to set up category folders and nest subfolders inside them. If you’ve already gotten used to Apple Notes, there’s nothing wrong with sticking with it. Oh yes, and if you’re feeling adventurous, you can dictate notes to Siri—it’s not as knowledgeable as the other AI-powered assistants out there, but it transcribes speech pretty well.

Bear

screen with bear notes app on it

Photograph: Bear

Meet Apple Notes’ more refined cousin. Bear notes offer a bevy of styling options that allow you to change themes, adjust formatting, and play with the typography of your notes. (It is available on iPhones, iPads, and Mac computers only.) Functionally, Bear works the same as any of the other apps on this list, albeit with a lot more flair. It packages all its features in a warm, cozy style that won Apple’s design award in 2017.

One of Bear’s most helpful features is the ability to link notes together via tags. Just tag your thoughts with the appropriate category (work, wedding, books to read) as you jot them down, and Bear will sort them into their proper folders. If it feels like your thoughts come from all over the place, or if you’re bad at keeping things organized in folders, this can be a great way to keep your digital life in order.

Bear got a big version 2 update last year, which was a labor of love that gave it a bunch of new features. The updated app is better at organizing tables, has the ability to add footnotes, and offers better in-note search. It’s all wrapped in a more pleasant design too.

Bear is a free app, but a Pro version costs $30 per year and offers additional features like custom themes, the ability to sync with iCloud, and the option to export notes in more formats like PDF and HTML.

Evernote

Sorry to say, but we can’t recommend Evernote anymore. Once the most innovative of the cloud-based notes apps, Evernote has since evolved into a sad shadow of itself. The app now is a cluttered mess that has jammed together just about every feature imaginable: group chat, photo transcription, web clipping, and integration with other online services. As a result, it’s much more cumbersome to use than the others on this list when you just want to jot down a simple idea. We were also turned off by the sheer volume of pop-up ads that appear over and over to prompt you to subscribe to Evernote’s $130 per year premium tier. (Evernote’s current new parent company, Bending Spoons, laid off its entire US workforce last year.)

Unfortunately, lots of people still use Evernote, and probably feel locked into its now-degraded ecosystem. It may be hard to make that switch to a new app, but if you’d like to, it’s possible to remove your notes from Evernote. Sadly, exporting your stuff off the app has become almost as cumbersome as using the app itself. Still, if you plan to make the switch, here’s how to do it:

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Business Industry

Galaxy AI: Better your note-taking game with Samsung Note Assist

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AI is a huge part of the user experience on the Galaxy S24 series. One out of four customers are buying the 2024 flagship because of its AI features, and Samsung has also brought those features to millions of existing users.

Galaxy AI is available for various Samsung devices, including the Galaxy S24, Galaxy S23, Galaxy S23 FE, Galaxy Z Fold 5, Galaxy Z Flip 5, and Galaxy Tab S9, and it boasts a wide variety of functions that help you enhance your productivity.

For those who take a lot of notes and use the Samsung Notes app that comes preloaded on all Galaxy devices, One UI 6.1 and Galaxy AI have what Samsung calls Note Assist.

Note Assist is a suite of features that enable you to summarize notes and format them with a single tap, translate text into various languages, and fix spelling mistakes. In this article, we explain all that Note Assist has to offer and how you can activate and use its functionality.

How to enable Note Assist

Before you start fixing your notes, the first step is to enable Note Assist from your device settings. Follow the instructions below to do that.

  1. Open the Settings app on your phone.
  2. Scroll down and tap Advanced features.
  3. Select Advanced Intelligence.
  4. Select Samsung Notes.
  5. Turn on Note Assist by tapping the toggle at the top.

It’s also important to point out that most of these features require an internet connection to work, so make sure you are connected to Wi-Fi or have mobile data enabled.

Auto format notes

Note Assist’s best feature is Auto format, which helps you format your text-heavy notes. Notes jotted down at, say, a meeting or during a class can be a disorganized mess, but thanks to Note Assist, you don’t need to spend time manually formatting those notes to make them more presentable and easier to read.

Auto format can intelligently restructure long blocks of texts with headers and bullet points. But that’s not all: it also suggests various header colors and fonts to make your notes more visually appealing.

Auto format can also format text into meeting notes. The formatting in this case focuses on keeping things more succinct. No matter which formatting option you select, Auto format provides you with five auto-formatted results to choose from.

Once you decide which one you like, you can instantly copy the formatted text, have Note Assist replace the existing text with the formatted text, or add the formatted text in a new page or an entirely new note.

To format notes in Samsung notes, follow the steps below.

Step 1. Open any note that has 200 words or more in the Samsung Notes app.

Step 2. Tap the Galaxy AI logo at the bottom (it’s the one with the stars, as shown in the screenshot below).

Step 3. Select the text you wish to format, then select Auto format from the pop-up menu, followed by either Headers and bullets or Meeting notes.

Step 4. Wait a few seconds for the formatted text to show up, then swipe left until you have seen all the results.

Step 5. Then, use the buttons at the bottom of the screen to copy the formatted text, replace the existing text with the formatted text, or save it as a new page in the same note or a separate new note.

Summarize notes

Summarize is another useful Note Assist feature. The summarize feature condenses your notes into four or five key points so the reader can get the gist of the text at a quick glance. You can get either a standard summary or a detailed summary; the latter adds a couple of extra details to each point while still keeping the summary short and sweet.

To format notes in Samsung notes, follow the steps below.

Step 1. Open any note that has 200 words or more in the Samsung Notes app.

Step 2. Tap the Galaxy AI logo at the bottom (it’s the one with the stars, as shown in the screenshot below).

Step 3. Select the text you wish to format, then select Summarize from the pop-up menu.

Step 4. After a few seconds, you will be presented with a standard summary of the note.

Step 5. If the standard summary isn’t enough, tap the Settings icon (highlighted in the screenshot below) and select Detailed to get a longer summary.

Step 6. Then, use the buttons at the bottom of the screen to copy the standard or detailed summary, replace the existing text with the summary, or save it as a new page in the same note or a separate new note.

Translate notes

You can translate your notes into various languages using Galaxy AI and Note Assist. Like any other text translation system, Note Assist automatically detects the source language and then translates the text to the chosen target language. You can also manually select the source language if automatic detection doesn’t work correctly.

Translation supports the following languages, with more to follow later:

  • Chinese Simplified
  • English (United States, United Kingdom, India)
  • French
  • German
  • Hindi
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Polish
  • Portuguese (Brazil)
  • Spanish (Mexico, Spain, United States)
  • Thai
  • Vietnamese

To translate notes, you will first be asked to download the relevant language pack. These packs can be 100s of megabytes large, so it’s recommended to use a Wi-Fi connection to download them.

To translate your notes, follow the steps below.

Step 1. Open any note in the Samsung Notes app.

Step 2. Tap the Galaxy AI logo at the bottom (it’s the one with the stars, as shown in the screenshot below).

Step 3. Select Translate from the pop-up menu.

Step 4. After a few seconds, a pop-up window will ask you to select the source and target language. Tap on the language you wish to change to see a list of all downloaded languages. You can also download new languages here by selecting the Add languages option.

Step 5. Once you have selected the right source and target languages, tap the Translate button to get the translated text.

Step 6. Then, use the buttons at the bottom of the screen to copy the translated text, replace the existing text with the it, or save the translated text in a new page in the same note or a separate new note.

Correct spelling

This is the most basic feature in Note Assist and checks your notes for spelling mistakes and allows you to correct them. Using the spellcheck is simple. Open any note in Samsung Notes, tap the Galaxy AI icon, select the text you want corrected, and select Correct spelling.

Doing so will bring up the existing text in a pop-up window with all spelling mistakes fixed. Each spelling that has been corrected will be underlined, and you can tap an underlined word to see the original spelling and switch back and forth between the two.

Once you are satisfied with the results, use the buttons at the bottom of the screen to copy the spell-corrected text, replace the existing text with it, or save it as a new page in the same note or a separate new note.

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Business Industry

Google trying to copy Samsung’s lock screen note-taking feature

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Last updated: March 17th, 2024 at 14:23 UTC+01:00

Google is working on equipping Android with the ability to assign a default note-taking app, which will give also you an option to add a shortcut for taking notes on the lock screen, and this feature will support input from a stylus as well. At the same time, the company is also working on making Google Keep compatible with the upcoming feature, allowing it to become a default note-taking app and take notes from the lock screen.

So far, when you enabled the upcoming feature in Android through developer options, set Google Keep as the default note-taking app, and then accessed the note-taking shortcut from the lock screen, Google Keep notified you that you had to update the app to use the functionality. Well, there’s been some change to that.

According to a new report from 9To5Google, when you update Google Keep to version 5.24 or later and access the note-taking option on the lock screen, the app now says “coming soon.” It hints that Google could very soon enable the functionality allowing Google Keep to take notes directly from the lock screen. The upcoming feature in Android and Google Keep could be very convenient for people who take notes frequently.

Now, here’s something very interesting. Samsung Galaxy Note series and S2X Ultra (from S21 Ultra) smartphones have been offering this feature for a long time. Samsung had to build a custom system to make that happen. Once Google brings the default note-taking option, Android will have a central API for it, and third-party developers and phone manufacturers can use it to offer the same functionality as Samsung’s phones.

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