New Favorite Program

I never understood the appeal of a sticky notes program. I preferred the original hand-written notes, if anything at all. And for longer stuff, I have a text file on my desktop that I use. So what's the point of a sticky notes program?

Well, after reading that 46 freeware utilities article, I decided to try one just because. I was giving a lot of those utilities a chance after reading the article, and found some good ones. I picked Stickies because it looked like the most simple one available, and sounded solid and reliable.

I'm in love.

It's a really simple program, yes, but very powerful. I put it in my startup, and it's always running in the background. And it's not a memory hog, either, which had me a little worried. No, it's a very small program, with no extra garbage in it at all.

I wasn't sure I'd use it, but the review mentioned alarms, so I tried it. And I quickly discovered that it can completely fill the spot on my system formerly occupied by Mozilla Sunbird. See, I used to use Outlook, which had nifty recurring alarms that I really needed to keep myself on track. Then I switched over to Sunbird when I got rid of all the MS Office stuff, and to my dismay the alarm function on Sunbird doesn't work right. I was really missing my alarms... but Stickies alarms can do every single thing, including recurrence, that I wanted from Sunbird and used to get from Outlook. (I'll note here that I still want a good calendar program that can import sports' schedules and stuff, but Sunbird is just way too buggy and memory hogging for me right now. At least I have my alarms back!)

To my surprise, I'm also starting to use it as an actual sticky note program, with a To Do list on my desktop most of the time. And during those times I want to have a clean desktop, I set any stickies I don't want to lose to sleep for awhile, and viola! Clean desktop until the notes wake up. If I accidently close a note I didn't want to get rid of, I can recover it as long as I don't keep closing notes (the program saves a user-set number of closed notes, just in case).

This particular program also has network and e-mail options, but I'm not very interested in them. It would be nice to send stickies to hubby-Eric, but unfortunately his OS isn't supported (he's a Mac guy, I use PCs (I wonder if his Mac sticky program can read notes I send to him from this one?)). Still, the alarm function alone makes this program worth it for me. And I was also able to do a quick skin customization to make it fit my desktop style (which is Windows classic in green). I also have the option of changing the styles of notes: the background colors and font styles, and can save up to ten different styles. I made a style with courier font for certain types of lists, which is useful.

The drawbacks are few. I had to strain to think of any. I could only think of two, and they are minor, to say the least. The first would be the lack of a way to minimize notes. The sleep function makes up for it, in my opinion, but it might be useful to be able to drop them to the program bar instead of having them on the desktop. Then again, that would kind of defeat the purpose, too.

The other issue I have isn't even with the main Stickies program, but with one of the tools the programmer offers to go with it. It's called Stickies Store and I simply cannot get it to work on my machine at all. I'd love to have it, even in its limited form. I'd love it even better if it automatically stored any closed Stickies then allowed you to delete anything you didn't want to keep. But I can't get it to work at all. A minor disappointment, to be sure, yet a disappointment nonetheless.

All-in-all, I love this program. I'm really glad to have my alarms back, and in a better format than either Outlook or Sunbird ever provided. If you have need of a reminder program, give this one a try. I'm sure glad I did, even though I was certain I'd never use a sticky notes program of any kind.

Update: After reading my review, the programmer e-mailed me to help troubleshoot my issues with Stickies Store, and fixed everything. I now have it working nicely. I suspect that this is going to be one of those programs that I support with a donation. Once I have a little money to spare.