Stickies creates virtual Post-it notes that you can stick
anywhere on your screen—a triumphant software answer to the thousands
of people who stick notes on the edges of their actual monitors. Like the Stickies widget in
Dashboard, you can open this program with a keystroke (highlight some
text, and then press Shift-
-Y)—but the program is a lot more powerful than
the widget.
You can use Stickies to type quick notes and to-do items, paste in Web addresses or phone numbers you need to remember, or store any other little scraps and snippets of text you come across. Your electronic Post-it notes show up whenever the Stickies program is running (Figure 16-27).
Figure 16-27. In the old days of the Mac, the notes you created with Stickies were text-only, single-font deals. Today, however, you can use a mix of fonts, text colors, and styles within each note. You can even paste in graphics, sounds, and movies (like PICT, GIF, JPEG, QuickTime, AIFF, whole PDF files, and so on), creating the world’s most elaborate reminders and to-do lists.
The first time you launch Stickies, a few sample notes appear
automatically, describing some of the program’s features. You can
quickly dispose of each sample by clicking the close button in the
upper-left corner of each note or by choosing File→Close
(-W). Each time you close a note, a dialog box
asks if you want to save it. If you click Don’t Save (or press
-D), the note disappears permanently.
To create a new note, choose File→New Note (-N). Then start typing. Or drag highlighted
text or graphics into the note from another program, or paste, or
choose File→Import and select any plain text file or RTF (Rich Text
Format) document to bring it into a note. (You can also drag Web
addresses into a note directly from a Web browser’s address
bar.)
Tip
If one particular note contains your most important information—your to-do list, say—you can force it to remain in front of all other windows, even if Stickies itself gets shunted to the background. Just click the note, and then choose Note→Floating Window.
Have a favorite style for your sticky notes? First create a new note, choosing the color and text style you like and setting it to the size you prefer. Then choose Note→Use as Default. All new notes you create now appear in the size, font, and color you’ve chosen.
Stickies includes a few built-in tricks for managing a deskful of notes:
There’s a small resize handle on the lower-right corner of each note. Drag it to make notes larger or smaller onscreen.
Use the small triangle in the upper-right corner of each note to zoom and shrink note windows with a single click. The first click expands a note nearly to full-screen size. Another click pops the note back down to normal size.
The best option: Double-click anywhere along the dark strip at the top of each note to collapse it into a compact one-line mininote, as shown in Figure 16-28. You also can collapse a selected note by choosing Window→Collapse (
-M).
Tip
The most efficient way to use Stickies is to keep the notes in their collapsed state, as shown in Figure 16-28. When a note is collapsed, the first line of text shows up in tiny type in the collapsed title bar of the note, so you don’t have to expand the note to remember what’s in it. And since many—if not most—of your notes can probably be summed up in a couple of words (“Pick up dry cleaning,” “Call Mom”), it’s possible to keep your sticky notes in their collapsed state permanently.
Stickies has word processor–like commands for creating designer sticky notes, with any combination of fonts, colors, and styles (explore the Font menu). You can also choose from six background colors from the Color menu.
The notes you create in Stickies last only as long as you keep them open. If you close a note to get it out of the way (and click Don’t Save in the confirmation box), it vanishes permanently.
If you want to preserve the information you’ve stuffed into your notes in a more permanent form, use File→Export Text to save each note as a standalone TextEdit document. When you use the Export Text command, you have the following options:
Plain Text. This option saves your note as a plain text file, with neither formatting nor pictures.
RTF. RTF stands for Rich Text Format, a special exchange format that preserves most formatting, including font, style, and color choices. You can open the resulting RTF file in just about any word processor with all your formatting still intact.
RTFD. RTFD, a strange and powerful variant of RTF, is a Rich Text Format document with attachments. When you export the note as an RTFD file, the result is a TextEdit document that has embedded within it the entire program or document you dragged in. The program icon appears just as it did in the sticky note, but if you double-click the icon, the program actually opens.
Figure 16-29. The text ruler gives you control over tab stops, paragraph
justification, and so on. Pressing -R makes it appear and disappear. On the
toolbar, the Style pop-up menu lists canned sets of character and
paragraph formatting, so you can apply them consistently
throughout a document.
If you don’t have embedded programs or documents in your notes, then exported RTFD files are exactly the same as their RTF counterparts.