gHacks technology news » sticky notes

Desktop Notes Taking

Martin — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 17:37:13 +0000

Shirusu Pad is without doubt one of the best desktop notes taking applications for the Windows operating system. Two things that make it stand out are the low resource usage while running on the computer system. It actually uses less than 700 Kilobytes of computer memory while running on the system, barely noticeable one could say. Its feature set is the other thing that is standing out. The application can be displayed on the computer desktop at all time or in the system tray depending on the needs of the user.

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.

PinNotes

Martin — Sat, 10 May 2008 13:14:34 +0000

Sticky Notes programs come in the dozens these days and it’s more a matter of taste than everything else that decides which of the applications is in use by a user. I’m not claiming that PinNotes is different, not much at least but it does offer some features that I need. It does provide the basic functionality that every sticky ootes application has.

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.