So here's a subject I haven't talked about in a long time.
To be honest I completely forgot that they were even part of Mac OS.
It's an app that's on your Mac called Stickies.
It's been around for a long time.
I'm going to use Spotlight to launch it.
Command space, Stickies.
What is it?
Well, it simply simulates little sticky notes, or post it notes, that are on your desktop.
So you get these little notes here.
It gives you a couple samples to start off.
But you can create your own by going into File, New note, and you get this little window
with a little title bar there that you can move around.
You can type whatever you want in it.
You can create little lists, you can put procedures you need to do everyday.
Important numbers or websites.
You can put anything you want in here.
You can completely format it.
So you can do fonts and change the color of the entire note.
So you can have all different types of notes up there.
You've got a full set of editing tools so it's kind of like a little text editor.
You can even import text into it if you want.
These things float around on your screen.
It can go anywhere you want.
Now, they are only there as long as Stickies is running.
So if I quit Stickies, they go away.
But if I open it again, then they all come back and they remember their positions.
In addition to be able to close a sticky you can also click this little button here and
it shrinks down to just the title bar.
So you can kind of get it a little bit out of the way.
But not only that you can actually bring them to the front permanently.
So here I'm going to run Safari.
You can see Safari is covering these because they're regular windows.
But I can select this window in Stickies and now I can select to have it put on top.
So now it floats on top so no matter what I do with Safari it's not going to be able
to get on top of the sticky note.
So I can stick it off in the corner and it will always be something on top of things.
You can easily grab a corner here to shrink it down to make it nice and small so it's
not in the way.
I can also make it translucent so you can kind of see through the window a little bit
if I want.
All you have to do is click the sticky to activate the Stickies app and I can make changes
again.
So I can turn all that off so it's not floating on top anymore.
You can see the windows can kind of overlap each other in different ways.
Actually when I select a window in Stickies only that window jumps to the front of whatever
I've got going on there.
So you see this one didn't jump to the front.
So there's a lot you can do.
Double clicking on the title bar will do the same as clicking here so you can shrink it
easily.
It's really nice to be able to color them up with all sorts of things.
You can even include graphics.
You can drop and drop graphics in there.
You can set text color by going to Font, and then Show Colors, and setting a color for
that.
A lot of different things you can do.
So this all sounds great but what are the advantages and disadvantages to using Stickies
over more modern things like say Notes or Reminders.
Well, Notes and Reminders are both part of iCloud.
So the great thing is that they sync up across all your Macs and your iOS devices.
You add something to your Notes on your Mac you can see them on your iPhone, your iPad,
your other Mac.
That kind of thing.
The same thing with Reminders.
They can even have alarms and notifications and all.
It's easy to write lists and check things off in Reminders or even create lists in Notes
as well.
So Notes and Reminders are definitely more modern and more capable apps of doing lots
of things.
But Stickies are really nice in how they fit on the screen.
They take up very little space.
So for tasks that are very max specific.
Say, for instance, you're a video editor and you have to go through a certain process when
you're finished up a video to do certain things with it.
You know send it to somebody, put it in some shared directory, a few other things you need
to as name it a certain way.
This isn't something you need on your iPhone but you may just want to create a little sticky,
have that available, maybe if you always have Stickies running it's always off there in
a corner and it can just remind you of those different things.
Maybe if you're at work you've got different phone extensions.
You've got a in-house phone so it really doesn't help to have the phone numbers in Contacts
very much because you're not calling from your computer, you're calling from the in-house
phone system.
You may have a little list of the extensions of the people you need to call on a regular
basis.
You can put that up there.
Just little things that aren't as important, maybe, as Notes and Reminders but it's helpful
to have them visible on the screen and you can do that in Stickies.
Now the thing about Stickies, like a lot of other tools, is it's highly customizable for
whatever it is you want to do.
So one person's use of Stickies is completely different than another person's.
For a lot of us there's really no use for Stickies as Notes and Reminders completely
take the place.
As I mentioned before I haven't used Stickies, or even thought about Stickies, in years.
When I asked a lot of people in Club MacMost recently about Stickies some of them said
they hadn't thought about or used them in years and other people said they have been
using them and still use them and it's an important part of their work on their Mac.