Stickies

Stickies is a PC utility I wrote to try to cut down on the number of Post-It® notes I was leaving stuck to my monitor. It is a computerised version of those notes.

The design goal behind Stickies is that the program is small and simple. Stickies will not mess with your system files, or write to the registry. Stickies stores information in a single text-based ini file.

Stickies will never support animated dancing figures, or play "Greensleeves". They are instead yellow rectangular windows onto which you can put some text notes. Once created, they will stay on screen until you take them away. Just like a real sticky piece of paper.

Main features:

Once on screen, stickies will remain where placed until closed, even through reboots
Stickies appearance can be customised; fonts, colours and buttons may be changed, and styles saved. Stickies can be resized.
Stickies can snap to each other and to the sides of the screen to keep them neatly lined up
Stickies can be attached to a web site, document or folder so they only show when it's on screen
Stickies can be transferred from one machine to another either over a TCP/IP network connection, or by using an SMTP mail server or MAPI client:
- Hierarchical friends list, which may be automatically transferred from other friends
- Play a sound file on receive
- Signature for transmitted or emailed stickies
- Favourite friends, and custom lists can be made
Stickies can be hidden for a certain period, until a specified date and time, or to wake every day, week or month, to act as reminders.
Stickies can have alarms set to ensure you notice them at a point you choose
Stickies can be transferred to and from your Palm or PPC PDA.
International language and RTL text support
Stickies works with Windows Vista
Stickies is small and simple, it writes to a single text file, and does not alter the registry
AD network administrators can use Group Policy to control settings
API to allow integration with other applications
...and Stickies is completely free!

Accolades

Since I made Stickies available on the web, some people have been kind enough to write to me saying nice things about it:

We are delighted to tell you we are using your program and think it is fab for internal work. It is saving us so much time and is so versatile. (Valerie Lawrence)
I've just downloaded Stickies, and wanted to let you know that I'm delighted! After wading through numerous other post-it note style programs, to-do list aps and other similar utilities, it is such a pleasure to find Stickies! It it so simple yet powerful, has useful features rather than gimmicks, and, of course, it's wonderfully free! (Andy Nix)
Stickies must be the most efficient, simple, small, compact, fast, useful program I have EVER installed :) (Martin Cleaver)
Downloaded your excellent program the other day. It's great to find something so elegant and effective in this monolithic software era. (Andrew Fung)
Your sticky program is the best. I tried a lot of other ones but your one is the best; sweet, simple and free! (George Barnes)
Your compact and highly impressive freeware has finally made my life so much easier. (Sonal Patel)
It's so rare to come across a piece of software in the Windows world that's well written and functional throughout that's freeware. This is a professional piece of software that really works well. (Steve Chen)
I have tested nearly 20 of these sticky note programs, but yours seems to be the best of all for my purposes. Thank you for the great work you have done! (Steffen Neumann)
I don’t think I’ve ever used free software with such a high degree of professionalism and breadth of functionality, so I just wanted to say "Thank you" for this great product (Sue Miller)
Stickies is beautifully implemented, well-documented and, astonishingly, it's free. We think you'll love it. (PC Advisor, August 2003)
I thought I would never begin to use desktop yellow notes until I found Stickies! (Jari Lehtonen)
... I make regular use of a program called Stickies, which puts electronic Post-Its on my screen.
(Lee Dembart, International Herald Tribune)
Stickies is the only software that I ever wanted to marry. (Peter Oliphant)

I know of users in Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Australia, Austria, The Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belgium, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Gibraltar, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Micronesia, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Republic of the Congo, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenija, South Africa, Solomon Islands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Uruguay, United Arab Emirates, the UK, the US, Venezuela, Yugoslavia and Zambia.

From the volume of mail I get I would guess there are tens of thousands of users. If you, or anyone else you know uses Stickies, and lives in another country to those listed above, I'd love to hear from you to add to the list!

Stickies has the ability to support some other languages for the menus and dialog than English. However, as I don't speak other languages, I need help to translate the English language in Stickies! If you think you might be able to help translate around two hundred words and phrases, please drop me a line. Unfortunately, it's not natively able to support languages for the interface with character sets much larger than English, such as Japanese, Chinese or Hindi.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to:

Alan Dobson for the hours of help he's given me.
Chris Maunder for his Trayicon Wizard, DateTimeCtrl wrapper class and CHyperLink.
Vojtech Lukosik for code to alter font sizes.
Jason Barnaby for general advice and help.
Jeroen Clarysse for code to do simple text-only printing.
Wes Clyburn for code to send an SMTP mail
Rob Manderson by way of CodeGuru for sample MAPI code.
Gonzalo Loguzzo for the default skin for v5.1a
John Fitzgibbon for the flag images used on the download page
Tiago Marques for design consulting
Cyotec Systems for base64 encoding routines

Massimo Arganese for Little Setup Builder (LSB). This installation builder is the one I use for Stickies, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. It far outstrips the other builders I've tried in terms of ease of use and its extensive functionality ... and to top that, it's free!

Miquel Pons for Catalan translation
Yu-Wei Chang, daviking222 and Peter Yuen for Chinese translation
Filip Veverka and Tomáš Pekárek for Czech translation
Martin van Es, Joris Drenth, Piet van Hees, Dirk Goossens and Rob Jongejan for Dutch translation
Carsten Hansen for Danish translation
Thierry Dulait, Eyael, Gwénaël Kergadallan and utopya for French translation
Michael Ross, Andreas Poehlmann and Sascha Mrowka for German translation
Giorgos Kostopoulos, Nikos Tzovaridis and John Papadopoulos (Ιωάννης Παπαδόπουλος) for Greek translation
Daniel Cohen Gindi for Hebrew translation, and help with RTL reading order code
Jozsef Tamas Herczeg and Balázs Zoltán for Hungarian translation
Eddy Tlessh for Indonesian translation
yayo (Roberto Correzzola) for Italian translation
Mitsuhiro Yoshida for Japanese translation
Seunghoe Yang for Korean translation
Piotr Murawski, Rafal Lampe and Sebastian Karwala for Polish translation
Eneida Gaspar for Portuguese (Brazilian) translation
Pedro Lino and José Carlos for Portuguese (standard) translation
Mărgărit-Mirică Georgescu for Romanian translation
Anton Granik, ava3v, Nikolay Komarov, Alexandr Perebeinos and Alexiz Kadev for Russian translation
Raul Bianchi Lastra, Christian Hess Araya and Mario Villar for Spanish translation
Martin Samuelsson for Swedish translation
Kuddusi Demir and Kenan Balamir for Turkish translation
Gwyndaf Hughes for Welsh translation

Contact

If you have any ideas or suggestions for Stickies, or (perish the thought!) find a bug, please get in touch! I try to reply to everyone who writes to me.

If you plan to review, or write a piece about Stickies in either an on-line or hard copy publication, I'd appreciate you dropping me a note to let me know! You're quite welcome to do so, but I'd just like to be able to grab a copy of your article.