While all these are much better, they don’t offer the main functionality of sticky notes i.e. pinning them to the desktop. Stickies, developed by Zhorn Software, is just the right alternative to Sticky Notes. It is filled to the brim with features, is more robust and offers deep customization. Let’s check these out in detail. Did you know? The physical post-it notes, from which the sticky notes are inspired, were invented by mistake and for the first few years nobody saw any use for them.
Download Stickies
Download Stickies from here and install it.
Adding a Sticky
Adding a new note or sticky, is as simple as double clicking the stickies icon on the taskbar tray. You can change this to single click by going to Settings > General tab and checking the Create a new sticky with single tasktray icon click option. By default, a new sticky is of plain text type. You can select making a new sticky from the clipboard, screenshot or screen area, by right clicking the stickies icon in the task tray. The screenshot & screen area stickies have drawing and annotation tools built right in, accessed by a right-click. You can also open a plain image sticky by checking the New stickies are image stickies option in Settings > General tab.
Go Really Nuts on Customizing
Customization is the true strength of Stickies over the default app. The visual style and behavior can be tweaked with plenty of options at your disposal. We will start with the visual part.
Appearance
Most of the settings for customizing the looks are available in the Appearance tab in Settings. The various options are changing font style, font color, background color and sticky width. Other options are toggling shadow and opacity. In the General tab, you can also set the height & width for new stickies. For more in-depth tweaking there is a Skin designer with tutorial here.
Display Options
This pertains to how the stickies are displayed on your desktop. They can be rolled (hidden)-unrolled, set on top and attached with certain windows. Attaching a sticky to an app (window) will launch it when the corresponding app or program is launched. To attach a sticky, right-click on the title bar of sticky and select Attach. Next is you can set a sticky to appear/disappear based on time and also set an alarm. This can be accessed by right-clicking a particular sticky and choosing either Sleep or Alarm.
Grouping Stickies
You can group several stickies together in stacks, which have their own set of customization options. To create and manage stacks, right-click on Stickies icon in task tray and click on Manage Stickies. In the new window, you can click on Files > New Stack, to create a new stack. The stack again has its own customization options which can be accessed by right-clicking it.
Miscellaneous Options
Email & Networking
Stickies can be sent to others through email or on LAN. For the former you need to enable Email from Settings > Email tab and need to provide the email address and STMP or MAPI server address. For the latter other sticky PCs need to be on the same network and obviously have stickies installed. The developer even has a Sticky sever app for the purpose.
Hotkeys & Advanced settings
What key combinations launch a new sticky can be configured from Settings > Hotkeys tab. Where the stickies are stored can be changed by again right-clicking the icon and selecting Move data location… Custom save location is a plus point as it can be used to sync stickies data across two PCs using any cloud service. One can also directly search on Google, Bing and Yahoo, by selecting the search term (text) from any note > right-click > select Search Engine. More search sites can be added by going to Settings > Advanced tab.
Importing Stickies
If you have a large number of sticky notes from the default app, no copy-pasting individual notes is needed. The developer has a Sticky Importer tool which imports them for you. Apart from all the above, there are many more options which you can discover by playing around with the settings menu. Most of them are self-explanatory and easy to understand. Additionally, to complement the Stickies there are a bunch of tools available from the developer, like the aforementioned Sticky server, Sticky Importer and more which can be found here. Cool Tip: Mac users need not worry, you too can add sticky notes to your dashboard. Plus there is also the option of Apple Notes.
Sticking to Conclusion
We don’t often see such an app which offers so many features and that too free. Zhorn Software, the developers of this app have done an excellent job. And as usual, do share your thoughts with us through comments, we would love to hear from you. SEE ALSO: How to Transfer Notes from Google Keep to Google Docs on Web or Mobile
