1. Sticky Notes

Sticky notes is the default sticky note application for Gnome. It is an applet that you add on the panel and access it via a simple click on the panel icon.

Sticky notes is a simple app and it is easy to use. You can configure the background color, font color and the default width and height. On the sticky note itself, you can also toggle the lock to prevent accidental deletion of the note content. While it is simple and short of features, it still can perform its task well, and one good thing is that it integrates well with the Gnome desktop and can access to the language library of the system. This gives you the capability to select the input method and the unicode characters.

2. KNotes

Knotes is the default sticky note app in Linux KDE desktop. It is highly configurable and comes with plenty of features not found in any other apps.

KNotes is actually part of the KDE PIM suite and an integrated component of Kontact, but it can be used independently as well. Being tightly integrated with the KDE framework, it give you functionality like drag and drop notes into emails, sending/receiving notes over a network and print note.

Features like editing the background color, font color, title font, text font, default width and height and the tab size are also available in KNotes. You can also paste note from the clipboard and perform a search to find that particular to-do list. You can add a title to each note for easy reference in the future. I found this nifty feature very useful and it is apparently missing from all other sticky notes apps.

On thing that I don’t like about it is that it doesn’t allow you to resize the sticky note on the fly.

Gnome users can also install KNotes from the repository, but must be prepared to install a whole bunch of KDE files.

3. Xpad

Xpad is a third party sticky note app (not to be confused with the xPad text editor and xPad sticky note for Mac) that is loved and used by many. It is lightweight, simple, yet extremely useful application.

Xpad is highly customizable. You can add basic styling (bold, italics, underline, etc) to the text, change the background color on the fly, resize the notes and even choose if you want to have scrollbar, window decoration on the notes itself. Each note comes with a toolbar that allows you to control all the note on an individual basis. You can even add or remove extra icons to the toolbar to make it more interactive.

Some of the Linux distros that are not using Gnome or KDE as the default desktop environment actually used Xpad as the default sticky note app in their distribution. If you are looking for a lightweight, yet highly configurable sticky app, this could be a great choice for you.

4. Pin ‘em up

Pin ‘em up is a Java-based sticky note application, which means it can run in whatever platforms that supports Java, including Mac, Windows and Linux.

Anyone who have used Java app on their system will know that it won’t run as fast (and look as nice) as the native app. This is also true for Pin ‘em up. It does feel clumsy when you try to move the sticky note around. However, Pin ‘em up does comes with some useful features that could worth a second look.

First of all, Pin ‘em up allows you to sort your notes into categories. You can define your own categories and categorize your notes into their respective groups.

Secondly, it supports importing/exporting of your notes to your own server to sync them with other computers. This is useful if you are using different computers with different operating systems.

5. Tomboy Notes

Strictly speaking, Tomboy notes is not a sticky app, but it is an excellent and extremely powerful note-taking app that I think it worth a mention here.

Most people who have used Tomboy Notes will swear by it. Its ability to link notes together with a Wiki-like linking system makes it extremely easy to organize your thoughts and ideas. The best thing is, even if you rename/reorganize your notes, the links will still be intact.

Accessing the notes is often a mouse click away. Simply click on the panel applet icon and you will be able to access all your notes instantly. Tomboy integrates well with the Sticky Notes (in Gnome) and you can easily import your sticky notes into Tomboy. It comes preinstalled in Gnome desktop.

Are you aware of any other sticky notes for Linux? If they weren’t mentioned in this article, please introduce them to us in the comments!

Image credit: closedzero

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Last week, WebNotes released a new product called “WebNotes Pro.” It may not be the most cleverly-titled project ever, but WebNotes Pro offers some fantastic new features for a whole new demographic of users.

Whereas the original WebNotes (which still exists, is free, and works great) was designed for a more social group, allowing you to share annotations and use WebNotes as something of a social-bookmarking service, WebNotes Pro is geared more toward the professional user.

As WebNotes sees it, the professional or student doesn’t need to share notes and highlights, they just need to be able to find and access them again, quickly and easily. To that end, you can create multi-colored highlights (fantastic if you’re cross-researching or stumble across something interesting but unrelated), as well as add sticky notes to pages.

Notes and highlights are automatically saved to your WebNotes account as you go – no saving or refreshing necessary. From your WebNotes box, you can view the original web page, the page with your annotations on top, or just your notes and highlights. If you don’t want to highlight anything, WebNotes can just be a bookmarking service.

Once you’ve got a bunch of annotations and notes, WebNotes lets you easily compile them into a document that you can share with your friends or colleagues – it creates a nice, simple page that you can email or distribute.

But I’ve saved the best feature for last – PDF markup. For students or professionals, reading PDF is an all-too-frequent occurrence. Memos, books, and the like all seem to come in the ubiquitous PDF format, leaving you with two options – either waste the paper printing, or go without any highlighting or markup. In order to do either of those things on a PDF, you’d need Adobe Acrobat, which isn’t exactly cheap.

With WebNotes Pro, you can now mark up PDF files to your heart’s content, in exactly the same way as you would any other Web page. PDFs are saved to your organizer, which creates for a browsable, annotation-friendly interface for all your PDF documents.

WebNotes Pro comes in one of two formats – either a toolbar (for Firefox or Internet Explorer) or a bookmarklet (which works with most browsers). Either one is simple to install, and makes annotating and saving pages much easier.

For me as a student, WebNotes Pro is a fantastic tool – it’s great for taking notes on reading, doing research, and keeping all my relevant material in one place that’s accessible from anywhere. As a professional, it’s nice to have a way to organize and mark up the PDF documents and websites that are relevant to what I do. WebNotes has brought me even closer to being totally paperless, and is saving me tons of time daily.

WebNotes Pro costs $9.99/month (again, there’s still the great free product), and there’s a two-week free trial. Students with a .edu email address get an automatic 50% discount.

And YOU, as a MUO reader, get an even better discount – we’ve got 100 invites for 3 free months of WebNotes Pro. Try it out, decide how you feel, and either sign up or drop back to the free option.

The first hundred people to click this link, will be taken to the WebNotes website, where you can activate your 3-month subscription, courtesy of your friends at MakeUseOf!

What do you think? Are you sold or are you sticking with Evernote? Share with us in the comments.

Photo: Megapixel Eyes

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So, when all else fails, look to the Web! I did just that and found a great solution for sticky notes that offers some great features in addition to the simplicity I admire on the Dashboard. It’s called Jjot, and I have no idea how to pronounce that.

Regardless, though, Jjot’s a pretty cool service. As soon as you visit the site, you’re given three sticky notes with the basic information written right into them. Delete all the information, and start filling up the sticky notes with anything – notes, research, and whatever else you can think of.

There’s very little in the way of formatting within a sticky note, whether you use Jjot or something else, so I wouldn’t suggest using it as a full-fledged word processor. You can bold text for emphasis, create hyperlinks, and create bulleted lists. That’s it.

The things you can do with your actual stickies is what makes Jjot really stand out.  Notes can be popped out into their own window, dragged and dropped to be reorganized, resized, or emailed to someone else. If you want to use your sticky notes as you would paper ones, you can also print one or all your notes for offline use. Jjot’s real use though is if you’re trying to get rid of the paper clutter.

You can share individual stickies or entire boards with as many people as you want, by providing them with a link to your board. Other people won’t be able to edit the stickies, but they’ll be able to read them – great for sharing meeting notes or something similar.

You can edit and create notes without creating an account with Jjot, but in order to save them and create new “boards” (new sets of notes, instead of new individual notes), you’ll need to create a free account.

To make your note-taking faster (one of Jjot’s biggest draws is how fast the application moves as a whole), there are a bunch of useful keyboard shortcuts available. Shift+Control+N creates a new note; Control+U creates a bulleted list in the current note; there are a number of other shortcuts as well, accessible at all times in the Jjot sidebar.

If you’ve got a lot of notes within Jjot, there’s a search function that lets you look for text across all your notes in order to find what you’re looking for. The search is great for someone like me, who likes to have each note only contain one item in order to be able to process it that way.

Jjot isn’t ideal for a full-fledged information management system, and it’s not designed to be. What it is, is a fast, simple-to-learn application for creating notes to yourself and others that are easy to create, easy to edit, and easy to share.

We’ve discussed other StickyNote applications on MakeUseOf in the past.  Karl discussed Stickies for Windows, Saikat showed you how to make your own sticky notes with Notepad, as well as Superstickies, Linoit, Posti.ca and StickyTag.

What’s your app of choice for the little notes you take all day?

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Even as research went online, taking notes on that research really didn’t. It still involved either cutting and pasting into Word, or writing furiously in a notebook. Research became easier, but recording it fell behind. That is, it did until WebNotes happened.

WebNotes‘ motto is “Annotate. Organize. Share.” That’s exactly what they do, nothing more and nothing less. For bookmarking and other features, as we all know, I turn to Diigo. For pure research, though, WebNotes is my new favorite, and may be my last.

WebNotes is not the only Web annotater I’ve ever used (I even loved the annotation features of Diigo), but it’s the simplest- which, for research, makes it the best. It’s simply a tool for taking, organizing, and sharing (if you want) your research findings.

Set-up is a breeze: once you’ve got an account with WebNotes, you either install the toolbar (a Firefox extension, Firefox-only) or a bookmarklet with many of the same features (which worked in any browser I tried). Then navigate to a site you’re using for research, and let the fun begin!

With WebNotes fired up, you’re able to highlight any text on a page, as well as create sticky notes that float on the page. There’s no limit to how many you can do, and WebNotes works surprisingly well in every page I tried to use- highlighting and note-taking were always responsive. The way I liked to do it was to highlight relevant things on the page, and then write a couple of notes about the key points of the article.

WebNotes’ usefulness doesn’t end there, though.  Once you’re done taking notes, the organizer gets the spotlight. Right from the organizer page, you can see all the highlights and notes you grabbed from a particular page- it becomes your notebook, with all the information you need right there in one place. You can look through your highlights, read your notes, and see where it’s all coming from.

One small feature that I loved is that WebNotes automatically updates your organizer as you send it more information, meaning you don’t have to constantly hit “Refresh.” It’s a small feature, but a sanity-saver.

You can organize notes into folders, with endless numbers of folders and sub-folders possible. From the organizer, you can launch any page on which you’ve taken notes- with or without the notes on it.

Though sharing features aren’t the point of WebNotes, they’re extremely useful and easy to use. You can share a page, and its highlights and notes, to another person whether they have a WebNotes account or not. Each page gets a marked-up permalink, which you can send to your friends and study buddies. Pages can also be shared via email, or even turned into a PDF. This makes WebNotes useful for group projects and studying, which is a great feature.

WebNotes is still in private beta, but I’ve managed to snag 100 invites from them. The first 100 people to register for WebNotes by clicking THIS LINK will be able to try the private beta – for everyone else, it shouldn’t be long before it’s public.

If you manage to snag an account, please come back here and let us know what you think about the site.   Is this something you see yourself using often?   In your opinion, how does it compare to other note taking sites?

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One thing that has always been available since the last 20 years from the birth of Windows has been the ‘un-noteworthy’ Notepad.  Life with Notepad couldn’t be any simpler. It strips all formatting and keeps data in its plain format. It doesn’t ask for any special Windows resources, comes up in a blink of an eye and doesn’t nag you with any dialog boxes or prompts.

We all use Notepad to store our scraps of data as text files. But with a little bit of tip and tuck it can be made into an effective sticky note.  Here I am going to show you how to make your own sticky notes with just the Notepad and any version of Windows.

(1) The first step – Creating a new file type

• Open any explorer window.
• Click on ‘Tools’.
• Select ‘Folder Options’ in the drop down and select the ‘File Types’ tab.
• Click on the ‘New’ button and create own file extension by typing it in the ‘New Extension Window’. I called mine – stky (for ‘sticky’)
• Click ‘Enter’.

The ‘File Type’ box gives us the power to create our own file types. A different file type for our version of sticky note gives us control over the way we handle it. So…

(2) Create an action and an application

With the new file type highlighted, click the ‘Advanced’ button. The ‘Edit File Type’ box opens. Click its ‘New’ button and you get to enter a new ‘Action’ and ‘Application Used’ dialog box. Type in ‘open’ and ‘notepad.exe’ respectively in the two fields. Close this box and move on to the ‘Edit File Type’ box.

(3) Assign an icon

In the still open ‘Edit File Type’ box, click on ‘Change Icon’ and choose any available icon or any of your own. Give a nice and apt name to the icon. I gave mine an unimaginative ‘Sticky Note’. Close all open boxes.

(4) Create a new registry value

No, this is not as scary as it sounds. Just a simple two step process.

• Go to Start – Run, and type in regedit, which takes you to the registry editor.
• Expand ‘HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT’ on the left pane.
• Scroll down to your file type. (Mine was .stky)
• Right click on the file type. Select New>Key and input ‘ShellNew’.
• With ‘ShellNew’ selected, move over to the right pane, right click on an empty area and select New>String Value and enter ‘NullFile’.
• Exit the registry editor.

(5) Just reboot.

After a reboot, right clicking brings up the context menu with your sticky note file type under ‘New’.

(6) Using it…finally.

After all the hard work, it’s time for the fruits. Want to list down a to-do list? Just right click anywhere on the desktop and choose the ‘Sticky Note’ file type under the right click ‘New’ menu. Type in the task under file name and then open the file to write something more descriptive. Create as many ‘Sticky Notes’ as you want and arrange them on the desktop.

Thanks to the versatility of the Notepad, ten minutes of mouse work just saved you the bother of installing another piece of software.

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The kids in the mail room were bringing me a few new packs daily. I stuck them everywhere. On monitors, servers, laptops even on interns. (Hey I have problems remembering names more than IP addresses!)

So when I came across this simple <1MB application that brought stickies into my computer world I was in love. If you are a “sticky” person and have a need for a great sticky notes software then this is an application you won’t want to miss – and of course it is free. So go grab this Windows only installer from here.  You can visit their homepage here.

I’m sure you are all saying to yourself….stickies?  Really? This is your innovative software?

Stop your chuckling freeware loving reader because there is more to Stickies… Something your precious 3M pads can’t do. How about syncing your post-it notes across multiple machines? And how about for the low low price of free?

Yup Stickies makes use of Amazon’s web services and lets you bring your sticky notes to whatever machine you want!

Let’s check out Stickies simplistic goodness. You install it and then you get a little icon in your system tray like so:

When you click on the icon you will get this context menu where you can create notes, show all notes, delete them, modify your preferences and the option to Synchronize your notes online.

You can change your stickies colors from the normal yellow to anything your sticky heart desires. As well as the font and transparency of the note.

Under application settings you have the option to start Stickies Automagically when the system comes up and the option to use your own custom icon in the system tray – that is very cool and an option rarely seen in a programs preferences.

This is the screen where you can configure your Amazon S3 account. You simply need to give it your Secret Access Key and your Access Key ID. Click the test button to verify you copied the information off your sticky pad correctly .

You can vary the color, font and transparency for each different sticky as seen below.

So instead of your office looking like this:

Throw those stickies on your puter’! What are you guys using to remind you of stuff your meat computer won’t retain? Let us know in the comments.

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So here it is, my recommendation of the 8 most useful plugins for Gnome-Do:

1. Locate files

I am definitely not the type who likes to dig several levels down the filesystem to locate a particular file. That is where the ‘Locate file‘ plugin is useful. Load up Gnome-Do (by pressing “Win + Space” key), type the first few characters of the filename and it will fetch the required files for you, no matter how secluded it is.

2. Twitter

Send your tweets from the Gnome-Do without having to open your Twitter client. A good and quick way to update your twitter without having too much distraction.

3. Rhythmbox

If you are like me, who enjoys playing music in the background while working, then this plugin is particularly useful. You can control your Rhythmbox to start playing your favorite track, pause, mute, unmute, volume up/down, change to next/previous track or to display current track info, all within the small Gnome-Do box.

4. Gnome Terminal

Gnome Terminal is useful because it eliminates the need for you to launch the Terminal. Being someone who love the command line interface more than the GUI, I simply love this plugin that allows me to type and run in the command line from Gnome-Do. (I used to have a Terminal shortcut icon on my dock so that I can launch the Terminal quickly. Ever since, I installed this plugin, I have removed the shortcut icon from my dock as I have no longer any use of it)

5. Apturl

Rather than typing ’sudo apt-get install package-name’ everytime you wanted to install a package, now you just need to type the package name and Gnome-do will do the installation for you. The only caveat: this works only if you know the full name of the package and spell it correctly.

6. Opensearch

Opensearch allows you to search from your desktop using a variety of search engines. From Google, Yahoo, eBay, CreativeCommon, Answer.com, Amazon.com to Wikipedia, depending on what you want to find, you can easily get the information you want from Gnome-Do. I particularly like to use CreativeCommon to find photos for my blog.

7. Flickr

Quickly upload your photos to Flickr without accessing your Flickr account in the browser. You can choose to upload one photo or a bunch of photos from a particular folder. It works quietly in the background and does not provide any distraction.

Tomboy Notes

Do you feel disoriented without your Tomboy notes? Well, I do. I use Tomboy notes to keep reference to articles that I have read online. That’s why I find this plugin particularly useful. It provides you with a quick and neat way to create a new note or to dig up material from your existing Tomboy notes. It is very handy when you have all the information at your fingertips.

(To install plugins, load up Gnome-Do by pressing ‘Win + Space’ keys. Click on the arrow at the top right hand corner and select ‘Preferences’. Go to the ‘Plugins’ tab and check the plugins you want.)

What are your favorite Gnome-Do plugins?

(By) Damien Oh is a technology geek who loves to tweak and hack various operating systems to make life easier. Check out his blog at MakeTechEasier.com where he shares all the tips, tricks and tutorials.

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How does it work?

Firstly, you need to sign up for an account with mystickies.com, where you need to provide name and email. Second step is to install mystickies’ extension for firefox. And once installation is complete new mystickies toolbar will appear on the browser’s panel using which you can start adding notes to any pages you visit.

Adding notes to pages is extremely easy;

1. Right click > mystickies > new Sticky
2. Toolbar > new Sticky
3. ….and more

At any time you can access and manage all your notes in your account area at mystickies.com, you can also edited. There is also an option for tagging ( ) notes. If you aren’t familiar with the concept yet then think of tagging as an activity of summarizing something with single words. A user that has left more then 100 stickies(there is no limit on number of notes), needs an easy and quick way to find a particular note. Obviously, going through all notes one by one is not an option. However, once you tag your notes with hint words (ex;work, cool, homework….) you can instantly locate ones you need.

….

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