The tools that sat on the widget panel were not useless. To the contrary, they were extremely helpful applications that many users found appropriate to utilize. The panel just did not present them in the best possible way – you already had a clock, for example, on the toolbar.

Some of the features, however, were reaching their potential but were not available by other means at the time. A fine example of this would be the sticky note application, which was a fresh new idea to Windows users at the time. Unfortunately, the sticky note widget failed like most other options on the widget panel, and as such use of such digital notes on the desktop waned.

A free program called Stickies, however, aims to fill this void. The program is specially designed to take all the functionality provided by normal sticky note applications and make them better, utilizing other tools that make it more practical than past attempts at such programs. Users can do far more than simply make notes that disappear under layers of windows – they can actually make the sticky notes work for them. You can color code each note depending on its content, or even set a visual or sound alarm that reminds you of whatever you wrote on the note at a predetermined time.

You can try the program out by following this link and downloading the tiny program onto your computer. After walking through the installation process you will find an icon featuring an entire pad of stickies on the taskbar. To get started, left click on the icon and a brand new note window will pop up.

It starts out very small and expands only as necessary with the content you place in it. Once you get started making a few notes you can begin experimenting with the various features Stickies has for its notes by right clicking the various areas on the note. Clicking on the title bar brings up functions that affect the entire note, like the color of the stickie, sleep and alarm features, and opacity settings. Clicking on the content section of the note allows you to change element-specific things, changing the color of a particular section of text or changing the font.

Finally, right clicking on the icon on the taskbar brings up one more set of options that allow you to manage even more, grabbing stickies that have fallen off screen or pulling them all to the front of your desktop.

With Stickies, sticky notes really have come a long way from their old use on the troublesome widget panel. Enjoy the same sort of features with far more practical applications thanks to a full list of handy tools that come included.

This can be helpful to note down contact information, research links, ideas and anything else that may seem important in regards to the website.

Here is how it works. You visit the website like you always do. The extension adds a small sticky notes icon to the Chrome address bar. A click on that icon adds a new sticky note to the web page.

The note can be moved around with drag and drop. Text is added with a single left-click to activate the note. Date and time are displayed in the footer automatically.

The notes stick on that page even after closing the browser or the tab. When the page is opened anew the note is displayed in the very same location it has been placed in by the user.

A right-click on the extension icon and the selection of options opens a configuration page. Here it is possible to access the notes summary which displays the web pages notes have been placed on and the extension settings with options to change the font and color of the notes.

Note Anywhere is a handy extension for Chrome users who sometimes need to have information at hand when they visit websites.

The main interface makes use of tabs to categorize notes into different subjects. The window is fully scalable to display as many information as needed on the screen at once. Several skins are available to change the design of the desktop notes taking application. There is also an option to change the opacity of the window.

What makes the application stand out are its features though. Some of the more interesting ones are the ability to define hotspots that will display the desktop notes taking applications if the mouse is hovered there for a time, url highlighting, the automatic ability to capture clipboard items and paste them into a pre-configured tab in the application or reminders that can inform the user about a specific event in regular intervals using various means including sounds or popups.

The desktop notes taking application can be downloaded from the official homepage of the software developer. It is compatible with most versions of the Windows operating system including Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. No information about Windows Vista on the developers homepage.

Multiple notes can be created and placed on the desktop. Each note can have a different layout which includes window size, colors, transparency level and state. State refers to the state of the window which can be hidden, minimized or locked among other things. The first difference to most note taking applications is the rich text editor that can be used.

It supports most functions known from programs like Word that support different fonts, font sizes, colors and several other formats. A very nice feature is the ability to add pictures to the notes, have not seen that in other note taking applications yet. Let me know if others support that as well.

Drag and Drop is supported which means that it is not a problem to drag huge chunks of text into a Pinnotes windows. Copy and Paste works as well which I use exclusively. Think it’s faster than dragging and dropping text.

The little notes can be set to always be on top which is the most useful feature in my opinion. I like to be able to quickly add notes and this options guarantees that.

Another feature sounds interesting but I was not able to make it work. A time can be set after which the note appears in the foreground again. It can be set between 1 minute and 23 hours 59 minutes.