These Note-Taking Apps Let You Forget Worries About Your Fading-Memory The next-best thing to total recall is a high-functioning app on your smartphone. Happily, there are at least four really good ones. (That we remember.)

"Oops! I forgot your birthday!"

Now that's an excuse that's difficult to digest in this age of automation. Thanks to the slew of digital stand-ins available to us, our memories can comfortably take a little vacation without us being none the worse for it.

Long viewed as something one resorts to simply to remember grocery lists, today's note apps are so much more than just that. From apps that track your appointments to ones that track your payment schedules to ones that let you remember the birthdays of your long-lost third cousin, notes apps keep pushing the envelope every single day.

The last few weeks have seen increased activity in the notes app space – the kind of activity that inspires people and shakes up competition.

Google Keep

Google's beautiful note app that was the pride of the Android world for the last two years came to Apple's iOS in the final weeks of September 2015, finally showing iPhone users what they've been missing out on all this while.

Keep is a versatile notes app that stores notes in the form of lists, images, scribbles, even audio clips that you can create by speaking directly into your device. Reminders are based on time or location, a nifty innovation that leverages Google's other location based apps in the process. The color-coded notes easy on the eye and easily searchable too. You can share your notes with others in an instant and access your notes from any device using Keep.

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Apple Notes

As if prodded by some sixth sense, Apple finally upgraded its bare bones Notes app just before Google Keep hit the App Store. Released along with the iOS 9 update in mid-September, Apple Notes is now a real pleasure to use. You can still make lists, share data across all your iDevices, copy and paste URLs and more but you can now add attachments to your notes, notes that can be written in myriad styles just by drawing or scribbling with bare fingers.

This is a pretty app that earns the right to be used over any other note app. You can use it to modify existing notes by adding media to them, create sketches using just a finger, use the built-in ruler to draw straight lines, mix colors with the wipe of a finger and use colors to organize data across the app.

Related: Taking Notes May Impede Your Ability to Remember Stuff

Inkboard

Have you had times when you wished that you could just click a picture instead of typing stuff out? I am in the regular habit of clicking pictures of things I want to buy or need to do something about. Trouble is, retrieving just that one image from my image gallery is a real task in itself. Enter a note taking app like Inkboard that is image-first.

Speaking of doodling and adding colors to one's doodles, nothing comes quite close to Inkboard in its efficiencies as a drawing-first note app. Users can click a photo and then proceed to Inkboard to create annotations, draw sketches or scribble notes with just a finger and more. What's more, you can even share your notes on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook or Twitter.

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Write

One of the key reasons for the popularity of note taking apps is the fact that you can capture small tidbits of information in these apps on the go without worrying about misplacing real-world notes or post-its.

But what happens when what you want to write is not just a three-item grocery list? What if you're traveling to work in a crowded subway and inspiration for your next article just strikes right there? I wouldn't want to waste time hunting around for my tablet or laptop. I choose the Write app instead. A blessing for writers who are wont to find inspiration in inconvenient places, Write allows you to capture long form content on your phone in its very user friendly interface.

You can edit content easily, create tags for each piece of content to help you retrieve it easier, even select blocks of text and move it around – something that most note apps are incapable of handling. My favorite feature is the passcode that you can set specifically for the app. It keeps out intrusive sets of eyes from work that you're not ready to show off to the world yet.

Related: For a Memory Boost, Ditch the Laptop and Write It Down by Hand