Knotes Turns Your New Tab Page Into A Beautiful To-Do List

Chrome: Sometimes the best to-do app is the one you have available — and if you use Chrome as your main browser, Knotes puts your to-dos and notes on a beautifully-designed new tab page. It also makes adding new ones a one-click operation, then backs all of it up to Dropbox or Gmail.

We’ve talked about the best ways to supercharge Chrome’s new tab page before, but Knotes, from Knotable (who has a number of other Chrome extensions too worth checking out) transforms your new tab page into a beautiful photo background with a space for notes and to-dos offset to the right. Depending on the size of your Chrome window, you’ll also see a clock on the left, so every new tab also tells you the time of day.

You’ll have to sign up for an account in order to use the add-on, but you can sign up via email, and your account is only used to sync your notes and to-dos with the Knotable on the web, so you can access them on mobile devices or from other browsers where you don’t have Knotes installed. Once you’re signed in (Fair warning: This seems to be the stumbling block for some people — they can sign up, but can’t log in via the extension, or their accounts never get activated. It took me a while too, but restarting Chrome let me finally log in.) you’re off and away. From there, it’s simple to use: Just start adding notes or to-dos. You can turn one of the note spaces into a to-do list to complete over the course of the day, or use them all for individual items you want to accomplish, it’s up to you.

There are other features, like emailing notes via Gmail and backing up your notes to Dropbox, but most of those come through the Knotes webapp, not directly through the new tab page. All in all though, it’s a good-looking to-do list that sticks with you on every new browser tab. It’s easy to use, and ties back into a pretty robust back-end that you can use on other devices, or just open in its own tab to use for calendar appointments, deadlines, and more. You can see it — and its companion webapp — in action in the video above, and download Knotes at the link below.

Knotes (Free) [Chrome Web Store via Knotable]