Chromebook owner? Google Keep’s latest update will unleash your arty side

The Google Keep web app for Chrome has been updated with sketching tools to allow users to add their own doodles to notes.

In case you’re not familiar with it, the Keep app lets you make notes with lists, photos, and even recorded voice memos to make sure you stay organized and don’t forget anything, and now the capability to add a new note with a drawing is available (plus you can add sketches to existing notes, too).

The drawing functionality is pretty much the same as you’ll find in the Keep app for Android. As 9 to 5 Google, which spotted this feature, notes, that means you get three tools to draw with – a pen, highlighter and marker – six different tip sizes for varying thicknesses of lines, and a palette of 28 colors to choose from.

Note that right now, this is only available with the Keep app downloaded from the Chrome Web Store (as opposed to the actual in-browser version of Keep, found at keep.google.com – that’s still a doodle-free zone). As mentioned, this functionality is already available in the mobile app.

Obviously drawing is going to work better with a touchscreen, but you can of course make do with a trackpad, particularly if you’re only adding rough doodles or the likes of scribbled annotations to your notes.

Points for stylus

Interestingly enough, this addition comes ahead of the arrival of the premium touchscreen-toting Samsung Chromebook Pro which was leaked a few months back, a 12.3-inch notebook with a 2,400 x 1,600 resolution display and a chunky six-core processor which will be the first ever Chromebook to come with a stylus.

So that will obviously be a great fit for the refreshed Google Keep web app, and there may be further touchscreen efforts in the pipeline when it comes to Google’s cloudy laptops.

The other good news about Samsung’s incoming Chromebook Pro is that while it may be billed as a premium model, the device keeps something of a lid on the price, and certainly won’t cost anything like as much as Google’s wallet-damaging Chromebook Pixel did.

Of course, it’s also worth bearing in mind that this year has seen the arrival of support for Android apps in Chrome OS, albeit only on three Chromebooks currently (including Google’s Pixel). Next year, we can expect a load more models to get support, again further extending the capabilities of Chrome OS-powered laptops.

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