MacMost Now 274: Mac OS X Stickies

Take a look at the useful Mac OS X Stickies program. You can add little notes to your screen that float above other windows. Use them for reminders, to-do lists or quick bits of text.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now and let's go ahead and take a look at Stickies. So Stickies is a program that has it's origins way before Mac OS X that allows you to put tiny little sticky notes all over your screen to give you reminders of things or as a useful place to keep text and images and things like that. Let's take a look. So to get into Stickies what you need to do is go to the applications folder and run Stickies. Once you do that you either get some samples or you'll get a blank note. Now, you can type anything you want into a note. You can also resize it very easily by dragging the bottom right corner. And then once you've got this you can go ahead and move it around the screen like that and, uh, put it anywhere you want. You can create new Sticky notes at anytime by doing file, new note, and creating one there. Now you can go ahead and change the fonts, colors, make it bold, all sorts of things like that. Um, by using the font menu you can also go ahead and change the color of a note. So you can change that note to a color and this note to a color as well. In addition you can change some properties of the notes. Like for instance, here I've got a note that is behind different windows but if I want to make sure this always stays on top, I change it to a floating window. And this will make sure that it's always on top because even when I've got applications this finder window here put applications selected this note stays on top. Whereas this note here will actually go underneath it. And if you want, you can also change the note to be translucent. So you kind of see what's under it like that. So not only can you use text, you can use images as well. So for instance you can drag and drop a picture into a sticky note. You can even use a smaller graphic element like that. You can embed it inside a text like that. Also you can go ahead and when you set things like fonts and note color and the type of note and all that and you get something you really like and want to use as your default you can go ahead and set use default like that. And when you go ahead and create a new note you see it's the same way. It's translucent, it's floating, it's going to use the same font style as the note you had selected when set use default. You can also go ahead and create lists in Sticky Notes, which of course is really useful if you're going to do little to do lists. So you can do this and then you can go ahead and do option tab to indent and start a list. Then you can go further in with another option tab or you can go back out with shift tab like that. So stickies don't have scrolling bars. So if you make a sticky too small to fit the content you won't be able to see it all. You simply use the arrow keys to navigate through the text rather than a scrolling bar. Another thing you can do is you can click, double click on the top bar there and it will shrink it to be just a really thin little bar and you can double click at any time to expand it. So this is a really great way to go ahead and you know save some space on your desk top. Especially if you have lots of stickies. You could also go ahead and arrange your stickies in various ways so you can arrange them say by the color of the sticky. What will also happen is they'll zoom down over here to this side and arrange on top of each other. Now when you go ahead and undo that it will stick it back where it is. So you can kind of play with the arrangement functionality like that and get them right back to where they're supposed to be . Now in addition to that you can also ahead and hover over a sticky at any time to get information about it. So if I hover here I see when it was created and when it was modified. Now how do you save your stickies? Well you don't. Stickies are saved automatically. So if I go ahead and quit stickies like that and go back into the applications and run stickies it would instantly bring back up those that I've had before. So basically it saves automatically. If you really want to, you can go ahead and export the text from the stickies. Also you can import text into them. I find though stickies the best thing to do if you wanted to say export from a single one is to simply copy and paste it and the same thing that you're getting text into it. Now you can also go ahead and print the active note, the one selected or print all notes. So if you saved one or two things on your to do list and you want to take that to go you can go ahead and print the active note. Show you some examples of a whole bunch of sticky notes. Like for instance you can have a little to do list. You can keep some needed data in it like sometimes if you're an artist you need to always remember you have to export certain sizes and you keep a little note there for yourself about it. Uh you can keep a quick little note instead of starting a text document on something. Uh you can also put a lot of reminders. Sometimes it helps then to make fonts a little bigger for reminders and things like that. One of the coolest things you can do is you can search all of your stickies. So inside stickies you do command F for find and you can search for something like that in all notes and it will go and find it in that note where that word is located. When you have a lot of notes like this it pays to use the arrangement feature so you can go ahead and use the arrangement feature all by content like that sticks them all there. Now one of the cool things you can do is you can create stickies from a lot of different Mac applications. So for instance here's Safari and I can go ahead and highlight something and I do command shift and Y. And it will go ahead and create a new sticky note with the text that I selected. So there's a quick look at stickies. Give it a try and see if you find it useful. Til next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Comments: 2 Responses to “MacMost Now 274: Mac OS X Stickies”

Jennifer

13 years ago

Thanks :D i couldn't find how to change the colour of my stickies, this really helped! Thanks!

Andy

Can I get stickies notes to stay on screen, even when I switch to safari? Using the floating window continues to shift my sticky off screen when I go to a safari page. Thanks

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 274: Mac OS X Stickies

Comments: 2 Responses to “MacMost Now 274: Mac OS X Stickies”

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