Google Preserve’s Android app is getting formatting instruments and model historical past

Excellent news for Android-toting Google Preserve customers: you’re lastly getting the textual content formatting choices the app has so desperately wanted for years. Google introduced this week that the power to daring, italicize, and in any other case rework textual content in your notes is rolling out now, and you need to begin to see it within the app quickly. (I don’t have it but, however Mishaal Rahman and some others really noticed the function forward of its official launch, so it appears to be coming quick.)

The brand new Preserve options are extra within the “ought to have been right here all alongside” class than they’re shiny new issues, however they’re nonetheless a welcome addition to the app. And really, Google has been paying an uncommon quantity of consideration to Preserve lately: customers bought a brand new homescreen widget earlier this yr, and now you can open a number of Preserve home windows at a time in your system. Google’s additionally slowly rolling out model historical past so you’ll be able to see all of the adjustments you’ve made to your notes over time.

Preserve is, should you didn’t already know, a superb note-taking app. It’s quick, accessible on Android, iOS, and the online, and it manages to be each very simple and fairly intelligent. Paste a hyperlink right into a word, and the cardboard reformats as a wealthy preview so you recognize precisely what it’s. A single-line word simply seems like a Submit-it, however an extended word seems extra like a doc. You may attract a word; you’ll be able to report audio in a word; you’ll be able to set reminders in a word! And since it is a Google product we’re speaking about, it’s all searchable and accessible within the sidebar of a bunch of different Google merchandise.

The brand new formatting choices make Preserve much more highly effective — whereas nonetheless being tremendous easy. Picture: Google

The massive downside with Preserve is that its future appears tenuous. It doesn’t get a lot consideration or many function upgrades — the app is a full 10 years outdated, and that is possibly its greatest replace ever! You’re by no means going to see some lengthy speech on the I/O developer convention about how nice Preserve is and all of the cool stuff you are able to do with it. That makes customers moderately apprehensive that Google would possibly at any second kill the app, because it has so many others, as a part of some cost-cutting or refocusing initiative. Preserve does many issues higher than Docs, however Docs is much extra more likely to nonetheless be round a couple of years from now.

That’s why it’s good to see Google proceed to recollect Preserve exists, simply because it has appeared to additionally keep in mind this yr that Duties exists. (Now, Google, make Preserve reminders present up in Duties. It’s proper there!) The formatting choices will presumably be accessible on the internet and iOS in some unspecified time in the future, they usually make Preserve much more highly effective on prime of that easy interface. Preserve stays among the best note-taking apps on Android, and basically, and hopefully it stays that manner.