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Google Keep’s Chrome app adds drawing tools, especially great on touchscreen Chromebooks

Starting out as a fairly basic note taking app, Google Keep has since been updated with more advanced search, bookmarking, OCR for images, and drawing tools. Added to Android over a year ago, the latter feature is now making its way to the Chrome web app.

The drawing tools are a near straight port of the feature found in the Android app. Users can start drawing by either tapping the “New note with drawing” button from the “Take a note” toolbar at the top of the app or by going into any note and finding “Add drawing” from the overflow menu.

A blank white canvas opens with an option on the toolbar to expand fullscreen. The three drawing tools include a pen, marker, and highlighter, with each having 28 colors to choose from and 6 tip sizes. Users can zoom in on the canvas for precise drawing with undo/redo buttons on the toolbar.

Other features include an eraser as well as a neat tool that can be used to highlight groups of drawings in order to shrink and move them around together.

At the moment, the tools are only available in the packaged app from the Chrome Web Store and not on keep.google.com through any browser. Fully usable with a trackpad, the drawing feature adds a nice doodling app to Chrome OS that works especially great on touchscreen Chromebooks.

Increasingly, more and more Chrome OS devices also include touchscreens. For a much better drawing experience, Samsung’s rumored Chromebook Pro with a stylus would likely work great with Google Keep.

 

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Avatar for Abner Li Abner Li

Editor-in-chief. Interested in the minutiae of Google and Alphabet. Tips/talk: abner@9to5g.com