Even in the age of the far more modern Notes program, the old Stickies app is still creaking along. It creates virtual Post-it notes that you can stick anywhere on your screen.
You can use Stickies for quick notes and to-do items, Web addresses or phone numbers you need to remember, or any other little scraps and snippets of text you come across. They all show up whenever the Stickies program is running (Figure 19-29).
Figure 19-29. 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 couple of 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 text in from any other program. Or drag text clippings from the desktop directly into your note. You can also drag a graphics file into a note to add a picture. You can even drag a sound or movie in.
Drag the icon of a PDF file into a note. (Stickies can even accommodate multipage PDF files. At first, you see only the first page, but the scroll bar reveals the rest.)
Choose File→Import Text and select any plain text file or RTF (Rich Text Format) document to bring it into a note.
Drag URLs into a note directly from a Web browser’s address bar.
In many Apple programs, you can select a chunk of text and then choose Make New Sticky Note from the program’s Services menu, or press Shift-⌘-Y. This command launches Stickies, creates a new note, and fills it with your selected text—all in one step.
Note
All your notes are stored in a file called StickiesDatabase, located in your Home→Library folder. You’re free to copy it, pass it along, and so on, just as you would any file.
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:
Drag any point of the perimeter of the sticky note to resize it.
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 mini-note. 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. 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. Plenty of notes can be summed up in a couple of words (“Pick up dry cleaning,” “Call Mom”), so you may even be able to leave your notes this way.
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. How do you “attach” items to an RTFD file? Drag the icon of an actual application (Preview, Calculator, or whatever) or a multipage PDF file, into a sticky note. The icon for the program or document appears in the note, but double-clicking the icon doesn’t do anything. 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.
You can also paste a graphic into your sticky note. When you export the note as an RTFD document, the resulting package file includes a graphics file of the format you pasted.