Here’s how you can install Cursive – Google’s new note taking app – right now

With the announcement of the HP Chromebook X2 11, HP also revealed that it would be launching this unique Chromebook/tablet/detachable with a couple unique apps on board. We already dug in and found HP QuickDrop and showed everyone how they can start using it right now. It’s a great service for quickly moving files from your phone to your Chromebook and the setup process takes almost no time whatsoever. The bigger, more interesting app that HP announced, however, is called Cursive, and it is a new note taking app from Google that isn’t confined to the Google Play Store. Instead, it is a web-based PWA and that means anyone can give it a whirl right now.

When we first unboxed the HP Chromebook X2 11 (that video is being edited as we speak), Cursive was right there waiting for us right alongside QuickDrop. We’re planning a whole review of Cursive as it seems many of you were interested in it when it was announced, but for now I’ve not had a lot of time to actually spend on it. Instead, my first move was to find the URL of the web app and see if it would work on other devices. And it does!

Install the Cursive PWA on your Chromebook right now

Once you have any PWA installed on a device, it’s fairly simple to find the URL where that web app actually resides. Up in the top bar, there’s a 3-dot menu and inside that menu is an option to copy the URL for the app. For Cursive, the URL is https://cursive.apps.chrome and when you navigate there, you are thrust right into the welcome screen and a quick tutorial for the app. Additionally, every Chrome OS device we did this on gave us the option to install the app right up in the Omnibox. Clicking this option puts an icon in your app launcher and simply gives the app its own window to live inside.

This worked on every device we tried from tablets to Chromebooks to convertibles to Chromeboxes to Chromebases. We’ve not tested the actual app too much just yet, but I was extremely excited to see that this PWA isn’t locked down to a single device and is readily available to everyone right at the URL location. When we talk about PWAs and web apps, that is part of the awesomeness we see in this future. Without the need of an app store, it is awesome to see apps like Cursive just become available on the wide open web.

Again, we’ll be testing this app out across multiple devices to see how it stacks up, but I’d caution you before you go try this on a random device: this is an early look at Cursive and being web based, it will likely work better on some devices when compared to others. Between the open nature of the app on the web and the universal nature of the stylus input we have on Chromebooks in USI, there are bound to be optimal and sub-optimal conditions if I’m guessing. As we get more time with the app, we’ll do a more comprehensive review, but for now go test it out for yourselves and see if Cursive could be your next go-to note taking application.