Reminders, tasks, to-do lists, or maybe just a plain inspirational message, post-it notes created a sensation when they were launched. They still clutter desks and notice boards, but everything has gone virtual now, why not sticky notes?
It struck me that I needed a virtual equivalent to Post-Its when I realized my entire working space was wallpapered in yellow. I have immense satisfaction in balling up the small pieces of paper and throwing in ceremoniously in the bin whenever I have completed the task. But now, thanks to space constraints and a twinge of environmental consciousness, I have discovered two great softwares.
MoRun.net Sticker Lite
With a rather unwieldy name like that, I was a bit doubtful about downloading this particular freeware. But resolving not to judge a book by its cover, I decided to try it out. The website has a huge list of features listed, but the one that caught my fancy the most was the ability to redesign the sticky note altogether; this includes the colour of the note, the font of the text and its colour, as well as adding a title to the note.
More technical aspects of the sticky note include the ability to email a note and to transfer it from one computer to another. While that is a great feature to have, I doubt its utility. There is a rather handy feature of allowing the notes to be hidden or to be displayed at will, which essentially lets me see only as much clutter as I want to. There is also a locking mechanism, which is a safeguard against accidental erasure.
Sticker Lite is a freeware made by a company that has all manner of tools, ranging from clearing browsing history to full-featured sticky note applications, and even password generators. The Lite version is more than sufficient for my needs, as it more than gets the job done.
Stickies
While Sticker Lite is a great software with lots of aesthetics, Stickies is a more no-nonsense approach to the business of virtual sticky notes. It has similar features with a more functional bent: the notes can be transferred from one device to another easily, whether a PDA or a mobile phone. It is possible to alter the look and feel of the notes, but as the website says, it will ‘never display dancing animated figures, nor play Greensleeves’.
There are some other aspects of Stickies that make it stand out from the plethora of sticky note applications: one is the ability to attach the note to a file or folder. In addition to that useful little trick, stickies can double up as reminders, by being set to a particular date and time. It can be hidden for specified period of time, acting as alarms for an event.
Stickies also encompasses foreign language support, however it is restricted to supporting character sets similar to English. In regards to security, Stickies does not affect the registry in any way, instead writing all its data in a text file to be later retrieved.
Both Sticker Lite and Stickies are good programs. An advantage they both share is that the notes are unaffected by system reboots, so until they are deleted the notes are permanent. There were other software I came across which were not free like StickyNote 3D, NoteZilla and Post-Its Software Note Lite. While they all had good features, apart from the attractive templates in StickyNote 3D, most of the other features were available in the freeware programs.
